There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.

In order to design a future of positive change, we must first become expert at changing our minds.

With the observable fact that scientific knowledge makes our lives better when applied with concern for human welfare and environmental protection, there is no question that science and technology can produce abundance so that no one has to go without.

I don't believe in the Great Man theory of science or history. There are no great men, just men standing on the shoulders of other men and what they have done.

The shape and solutions of the future rely totally on the collective effort of people working together. We are all an integral part of the web of life.

While we cannot predict the future, we will most surely live it. Every action and decision we take - or don't - ripples into the future. For the first time, we have the capability, the technology, and the knowledge to direct those ripples.

The future is fluid. Each act, each decision, and each development creates new possibilities and eliminates others. The future is ours to direct.

We are approaching a time when human intelligence alone will be incapable of managing a highly advanced society. Existing technologies are rapidly exceeding the human capacity to absorb and process information.

If our system continues without modification involving environmental and social concern, we will face an economic and social breakdown of our outdated monetary and political system.

Success is all about persistence and doing the right thing for the long term.

For every challenge we face - unemployment, poverty, crime, income growth, income inequality, productivity, competitiveness - a great education is a major component of the solution.

Great teaching requires incredible talent and dedication, strong intellectual ability and interpersonal skill, real discipline and empathy.

Many of us have been touched by the magic of a great teacher. I know I have.

A C.E.O.'s job is leadership, problem solving, and team building. I've done that my whole career.

The fact is that politics in Illinois is a blood sport. It's really rough. It's really nasty.

It's a difficult undertaking. I've been married for four years and I see this movie as a cautionary tale about people who've gone deeply out of communication.

I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.

You really can have your dreams and at the same time have a family. But it has to be a really deliberate practice.

What is happiness other than a negotiation between reality and your dreams? It's understanding that you give up something for something else. I feel like that's been how I've been trying to be happy, although in my DNA there's more of a depressed person.

I think of marriage as a garden. You have to tend to it. Respect it, take care of it, feed it. Make sure everyone is getting the right amount of, um, sunlight.

I love 'The Sportswriter' by Richard Ford. Ford really captures for me the bittersweetness of the quietly suffering American man. It's stoic, sad, and really beautiful.

My mom was a hairdresser. My aunt was a hairdresser. My brother was a hairdresser. My sisters are hairdressers.

I was probably 8 years old; my mom let me stay up one night. She's like, 'You have to see this movie.' It was 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' and it was on TV, and it was a big deal. And I saw Marlon Brando, and I was like, 'Oh, my God.' That's where it started.

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.

People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.

I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination.

Achievers have an enabling attitude, realism, and a conviction that they themselves were the laboratory of innovation. Their ability to change themselves is central to their success. They have learned to conserve their energy by minimizing the time spent in regret or complaint. Every event is a lesson to them, every person a teacher.

The ferment and viability in any society is directly proportionate to the number of people actively living their ideas. This is not positive thinking - it is positive action: the spirit of experiment.

Radical common sense is the wisdom gleaned from the past that recognizes the perishable opportunities of the moment. It is the willingness to admit error and the refusal to be deterred by failure.

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.

I believe that social change has almost reached critical mass. So many people have undergone personal transformation that their effect on society is having a geometric - not arithmetic - impact. This coalescence of energies brings about meeting, networking, and a sophistication in communications that is unprecedented in history.

Leadership desperately needs women.

'Focusing' is no conventional repackaging of self-help wisdom. It is at once a manual and a philosophy. It talks about the body's wisdom, the steps of the focusing technique, how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen.

A self-defined challenge is an irresistible teacher.

Everybody knows that love is better than hate, and peace is better than war.

Yes, an individual could be electronically stimulated to fear, anger, or euphoria from a distance. However, the procedure is complicated, not always accurate, and far too tedious and expensive as a method for taking over control of the world.

Problems can be experienced as... a chance for renewal rather than stress.

I can't make eye contact when people sing 'Happy Birthday' to me.

I wore a $30 vintage wedding dress for my 8th birthday in an underground jazz club in Seattle. This was what I wanted.

I think a lot of people think I'm either unintelligent because I'm a very happy person and I have a lot of energy or that it's a fake happiness, like fake energy. I completely understand that because it's a lot to handle, and I am a very emotional human being.

Everything is just so much more romantic and real when it's yours and it's private.

I love my mom so much, and I always have, but I was definitely a monster to her a lot during my teen years.

This may be a bit of a broad statement, but I don't think there's anyone that I've met that I haven't created a bit of a deep relationship with. It's a really lovely thing to create a relation with people that might not anticipate that closeness. And that's kind of the light of my life, getting to be close to people.

I honestly think what skyrocketed me into professionalism was learning how to play two people and still live through the day.

Laziness in my biggest pet peeve of all time. Get up, make a plan, do the work, and love yourself, people!

I love 'Extreme Makeover Home Edition.' It feeds my Fantasy Dream Home monster that lives inside of me.

I hope people remember me as a good and decent man. And if they do, then that's success.

Virtual reality sort of encloses and immerses the person into an experience that can be really cool but probably has a lower commercial interest over time. Less people will be interested in that, but there are some really cool areas there for education and gaming that we have a lot of interest in.