Everybody wanted me to be rich and famous on my art. And I said no to all the commercials and all the seedy offers.

Fame was never something I was seeking in my artistic journey. It's to be used as a tool for an artist to break open doors and keep creating. That's how I enjoyed fame in '74; it was not just for the emptiness of being famous.

I found out that total creativity involves a certain intellectual rebellion - not to become a criminal, but somehow. to be totally creating, you have to do things that are a little bit forbidden. You have to feel free, and we know freedom is a hard thing to get.

I, like everybody else, have a certain fear of heights, and I have to be very careful when I am in the clouds, but it is also what I love; it is my domain, so when you love something, you don't have fear.

If you see how carefully I prepare for any kind of walk, legal or illegal, small or big, you will see that, actually, I narrow the unknown to virtually nothing. And that's when I am ready to walk on the wire.

I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.

If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.

I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist.

I am not up there by chance. I am there by choice. And I know the wire. And I know my limits. And I am a madman of details.

Faith is what replaces doubt in my dictionary.

Introduced to this world in Llandyssul, Cardiganshire, Wales, November 14, 1843, I celebrated my first anniversary by landing at Castle Garden, in New York City.

Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.

Companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Intel were just starting at their 10-year anniversary.

Delphine Lucielle's paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of.

Yahoo is in everything from pets to old people to finance to communications to e-commerce and more, and I really thrive on that.

I thought I wanted to be an electrical engineer, which I turned out to be. But I was always curious about other things too, and what if I got interested in history or the law?

It was less in pity than in anger that the world was moved by the photograph of little Alan Kurdi, that dead three-year-old Syrian refugee boy whose name we're all remembering now on the first anniversary of his drowning, along with his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother Rehanna.

On Sept. 20, 2011, a year after I spoke with Rabanni, a couple of Taliban emissaries arrived at his Kabul fortress with a gift for his 71st birthday. It turned out not to be the truce offering they had claimed they were bringing: one of the Talibs had a bomb hidden in his turban.

Perhaps a hundred people assembled one evening, May 15, 1876, at the time when the country was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its political independence.

The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect.

If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts.

FOR a long time the conviction has been dimly felt in the community that, without prejudice to existing institutions, the legal day of weekly rest might be employed to advantage for purposes affecting the general good.

John Glenn's anniversaries have followed me all of my life. I was born in 1962, the year he orbited Earth.

My last trip to New Orleans was for the fifth anniversary of Katrina, and I had the awesome opportunity to bring my family down. We all worked on a house together and met some of the families.

David Letterman was my guy growing up. My parents recorded the tenth anniversary special for me, and I watched it 40 times.

I'm a dog person, but I don't have a pet.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring the victims and heroes of September 11th. As we commemorate the anniversary of 9-11, we must also remember that the threat is still very real today.

We must continue to pursue peace through diplomacy, but we must also not shrink from our responsibility through the option of strength. We must take advantage of internal resistance and change from within Iran to avert this path of mutual destruction.

There can be no argument about the Lone Star State's significant contributions to American history, and we must remember the actions and the sacrifices of those who made Texas independence a reality.

In the Steven F. Austin Colony, which was the first colony, Texans first established a provisional government in 1835 with the intention of writing a declaration of independence soon after.

One time, I had a guy, when I was performing at Caesar's Palace, and during the course of the show, I offered him an anniversary gift for him and his wife, and it was her watch wrapped in a little package.

When I became a teen, I ran into a friend at a magic shop who took me under his wing. I started reading up on magical theory and immediately blended that with what my brothers had shown me.

I've taken a tenacious bulldog approach to learning new skills throughout my life.

I don't think that faith, whatever you're being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don't want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There's so much mystery. There's so much awe.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

I've watched a lot of people who became famous who completely change and I think it's because they tend to believe all the hype that's out there. I don't think there's that much hype about me.

When I look back over my life it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me - from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money, because Africa was the 'dark continent', and because I was a girl.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That's what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

I'm always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

The part that always shocked me was the inter-community violence among the chimps: the patrols and the vicious attacks on strangers that lead to death. It's an unfortunate parallel to human behavior - they have a dark side just as we do. We have less excuse, because we can deliberate, so I believe only we are capable of true calculated evil.

Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn't so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, 'Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what's the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?'

My mother always used to say, 'Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God' - that's what she always said. The same God with different names.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

It's been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don't suppose anybody really understands yet.

I'm highly political. I spend an awful lot of time in the U.S. trying to influence decision-makers. But I don't feel in tune with British politics.

I am not deeply involved in Australian politics but I know there are prime ministers, governments around the world who are not acting responsibly in relation to climate change.