A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny, and hope that whatever your art is that you're putting out there, if it's received, great, I respect you for receiving it. If it's not received, great, I respect you for not.

I have tried every diet to lose weight. When you restrict yourself, you're setting yourself up for failure.

If you come out of the gate with a finger pointed, then you really aren't opening the door to any sort of resolution to whatever the problem may be. Whether it's about race or sexual orientation or religion, if you can't empathize with the opposing party, then you can't really meet in the middle.

If you go through life, and you don't find the beauty in an unexpected place, then you really have a sad existence.

I think that young women and little girls need to see that they don't have to be the damsel in distress. They don't have to not show their strength. They don't have to be whatever the stereotype is or the tropes that we go to in our minds.

You just keep moving forward and doing what you do and hope that it resonates with people. And if it doesn't, you just keep moving on until you find a project that does.

It's been pretty effortless with Sensa because I am not thinking about how long do I need to do this. Usually, when you stop a diet program, you lose control again. But I don't need to stop what I'm doing. I'm eating everything that I like. Sensa just helps me keep it all in check.

When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.

You go back and you read your Constitution. You read your Declaration of Independence. And you will see that the only people who could decide these freedoms were white males who owned property, and all the rest of us were excluded.

Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.

It's always good to go home. It's strengthening to see your past and know you have someplace to go where you're part of a people.

You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms.

When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night.

I like to do matrices. One option per line, different facets for each column. Salary, location, happiness index, failure index, and all that.

Really in technology, it's about the people, getting the best people, retaining them, nurturing a creative environment and helping to find a way to innovate.

I didn't set out to be at the top of technology companies. I'm just geeky and shy, and I like to code.

I love technology, and I don't think it's something that should divide along gender lines.

I definitely think what drives technology companies is the people; because in a technology company it's always about what are you going to do next.

One of the interesting applications of symbolic systems is artificial intelligence, and I spent some time thinking about how to create a brain that operates the way ours does.

I came in as an engineer and worked on artificial intelligence at Google. I worked on related sites and matching advertising to queries with some of our earliest ads.

Look. Art knows no prejudice, art knows no boundaries, art doesn't really have judgement in it's purest form. So just go, just go.

You have to respect your audience. Without them, you're essentially standing alone, singing to yourself.

When women make their image about youth and sexuality, and not about intellect, that's kind of a dead-end road. So I think it's a combination of self-entrapment and entrapment by society.

My public image is so low-key, but I get to travel the world and still have an audience and it's really amazing. I don't take that for granted.

Spend time reflecting on your emotional and physical existence and how that applies to the voice. You have to apply that wisdom and experience when you sing - it's what comes through.

Life is so impermanent that it's not about somebody else or things around me, it's about knowing you are completely alone in this world and being content inside.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.

Leonardo Da Vinci combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again.

When it comes to art and science, people don't like a lot of either. Instead of being open to it, they're closed off about it.

Working on 'Nightmare Before Christmas,' I had endless arguments, like the studio saying, 'You can't have a main character that's got no eyeballs!' 'How is anybody going to feel for somebody with just eyesockets?' You know? So, it's those kind of things that really wear you down.

In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.

Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?

I can't remember any dreams in my life. There's so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.

Things like 'mad as a hatter' or 'grinning like a Cheshire cat', are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.

Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.

When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.

I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world.

I did some sports. It was a bit frustrating. I wasn't the greatest sports person.

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.