The best escalator to opportunity in America is education.

Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statistics, economics and a foreign language such as Spanish. Religion may not be as indispensable, but the humanities should be a part of our repertory. They may not enrich our wallets, but they do enrich our lives. They civilize us. They provide context.

What use could the humanities be in a digital age? University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents' nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world.

My take is that the optimal approach to food, for health and ethical reasons, may be vegetarianism.

I've always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. That's a classic public health approach.

I took a gap year myself after high school and worked on a farm near Lyon, France. I stayed with the Vallet family, picked and packed fruit, and discovered that red wine can be a breakfast drink. That led to further travel as a university student.

During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.

Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them - and us.

Dr. Ben Carson has the most moving personal narrative in modern presidential politics. His mother, one of 24 children, had only a third-grade education. She was married at age 13, bore Ben and his brother, and then raised the boys as an impoverished single mother in Detroit. As a young boy, Carson was a terrible student.

Wilderness trails constitute a rare space in America marked by economic diversity. Lawyers and construction workers get bitten by the same mosquitoes and sip from the same streams; there are none of the usual signals about socioeconomic status, for most hikers are in shorts and a T-shirt and enveloped by an aroma that would make a skunk queasy.

Beware of generalizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to the religious equivalent of racial profiling. Hinduism contained both Gandhi and the fanatic who assassinated him.

It's amazing what one positive role model in your life can do in five minutes.

I think there are different levels of forgiveness.

Fear doesn't enter into my vocabulary. Fear is the gateway to the next step in my development.

I'm a prankster with a Monty Python sense of humor that somehow gets misrepresented in those tacky supermarket publications as bratty, snotty, and rude.

My advice to young wrestlers is that your surroundings really make a difference. You want to put yourself in good, positive surroundings.

There's nothing like success.

Freedom across the world is a result of many individuals working together.

Many of those who have paid the ultimate price for freedom have come through the wrestling ranks. We need to honor them and win this decision to have wrestling - the world's oldest sport - remain a part of the most prestigious athletic competition in the world, the Olympics.

I never won anything by myself. I was always strong because of help that gave me extra strength to win.

My coaches were great. My mom and dad. My dad never missed a wrestling meet.

My wrestling and family go together. It's always been that way, from day one with my mom and dad, my sister, my wife, four daughters, grandsons, son-in-laws.

I can't be told life is beautiful through a normal positive thinking book or a Hallmark movie; that language doesn't work for me.

I like to be able to feel as many parts of myself while watching a movie at one time. I think that's what 'Super' is - it's funny, but it's also sad. It's very touching in certain ways, and it's also got a very dark sense of humor. So it's allowed to go anywhere.

By isolating the issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, climate change, environment, governance, economics, catastrophe and whatever other problems the present embodies or the future may bring, science fiction can do what Dickens and Sinclair did: make real the consequences of social injustice or human folly.

I love raccoons. I had a raccoon figurine collection as a kid, and I now have two movies with 'Ranger Rick' jokes in them. I love 'em. They come in my back yard all the time, and we just stare at each other like a couple of idiots.

A lot of people die in my movies. So if you're in a few of my movies, you have a good chance of dying!

I've been making movies a long time. I'm a professional at it. I'm not a professional at making soundtracks - that's not my job. My job is to put the right songs in the movie so the movie works the best it possibly can.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with different planets in the solar system, and I used to create, for every single planet, a different alien race with a certain kind of pet, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of water system, and everything. I would draw these pictures. I had hundreds of these pictures in a box.

I have a very strong imagination and have since I was a little kid. That is where a lot of my world comes from. It's like I'm off somewhere else. And I can have a problem in life because of that, because I'm always off in some other world thinking about something else. It's constant.

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

My grandmother, she's been the positive portion of my life the entire time.

It's difficult for me to trust a woman. Men are attracted to beautiful women. Women are attracted to men who offer security - financial security. And if you have money and you're famous, women find that sexy.

I like to sort through music and see whatever pops out to me or inspires me. If I could have a production team going and kind of mix records with me, that would be cool; to take the records and have them sound the way I want them to sound. But I'd rather sort though music to find them things.

My grandmother, she's been the positive portion of my life the entire time. She raised us Baptist, and when I got old enough to say I didn't want to go to church, she didn't force me. She was cool.

I have a romantic side.

I had to overcome challenge after challenge in order to take my life from nothing to living my dreams.

Because hip-hop has no requirements, you deal with people that have the least intelligence on the planet. Some of the people that compare themselves to me, compare themselves to me because they rap and I rap. They can't even read the contracts that they sign to be a rapper, to do the deal.

Eating well was something I learned as I started to be successful and had to travel and perform concerts, which are an intense cardio workout.

People who actually have money don't want to talk about it. They want to talk about everything else.

Puffy's contribution to hip-hop culture was the remix. He offered us the music that his mom played in front of him, with newer drums and younger artists. That worked, and will consistently be there. The remix comes right after the original record, that's something Puffy did to influence the culture.

I think Sean Parker damaged the music business with Napster.

I don't display emotions. I have every feeling that everyone else has, but I've developed ways to suppress them. Anger is one of my most comfortable feelings.

You should tell yourself frequently 'I will only react to constructive suggestions.' This gives you positive ammunition against your own negative thoughts and those of others.

You create your own reality.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

People dwell so much on the little things, but why should they hold you back when you have the big things to look forward to? By exuding positive energy when dealing with your problems, you will exude it in your being in general. Treat yourself with love and you will exude love to others.

I live my life with positivity, so even if there was a low, I'd find a positive in the situation. It's how I am with everything in life. With acting, I don't love the celebrity side of it and the tabloids, but at the end of the day, I love what I do so much, it overrides all that.

College was especially sweet because of the positive, hopeful atmosphere of a college campus.