Humor's an excellent way to make a point more palatable and/or relatable.

Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya's remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty.

This whole beauty thing is something I've never comprehended.

It wasn't until my girlfriend, photographer Jennifer Rovero, took hundreds of pictures of me as I recovered from my amputations that things started to change. The process was a sort of therapy for me, which Jennifer coined as 'photo therapy.' I grew to see the beauty and strength in myself and my journey through the lens of her camera.

I stand not just for a disability, but I stand for women and women's rights.

I have never had a current state of mind. My mind changes a great deal. I am very affected by any sorrow or sad thing, and I am very affected by joy and beauty.

Happiness lies in moments, and while you have it, you're not even aware; only afterwards do you know you were happy.

When I was 18, I took it for granted and was eager to move on to the bigger cities like Boston and then New York. But I've been to enough places to have gained a greater appreciation for the beauty and rich culture of all of Rhode Island. I am grateful for all that it offered during my childhood.

When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.

We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.

The idea of the peace movement and of people who spent their entire lives trying to have a more egalitarian, just society, suddenly became swamped by the record industry, by the new rock and roll culture, and by the idea of not trusting anyone over thirty.

When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that.

What I'm very upset about is the attempt to dictate to museums what they show, and the statements made by politicians in Washington that have curtailed the freedom of the National Endowment for the Arts. The attention to those issues is deflected by the spin of my supposedly having trivialized the Holocaust.

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.

Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two - beauty and violence - live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be very cathartic.

Beauty is what I feel my life is about - the garden, the house, whatever. I see the world that way, yet it isn't.

Tell me I'm beautiful, it's nothing. Tell me I'm intellectual - I know it. Tell me I'm funny, and it's the greatest compliment in the world anyone could give me.

It's not some great work of beauty and love to be a rock-and-roll singer.

I think that passion and love and pain are all bearable, and they go to make love beautiful.

Music is for every single person that walks the planet.

You can't give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.

How can you consider flower power outdated? The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?

Old men do it better. We're not so sensitive in certain areas.

I like the idea of being alone. I like the idea of often being alone in all aspects of my life. I like to feel lonely. I like to need things.

Alone I'm nothing.

My dad played fiddle as well.

It's sort of a feeling of power onstage. It's really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don't really think it's power... it's the goodness.

I think Led Zeppelin must have worn some of the most peculiar clothing that men had ever been seen to wear without cracking a smile.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

My mother was a beauty queen in her hey day. That's where I learnt a little about makeup and hair... I had never picked up or even seen a 'Vogue' before I was 17. I had no idea about fashion, magazines, models or designers. No idea.

My first child, I think I was completely shell shocked. I was ecstatic but in shock that I was now responsible completely for another life and it was my co-creation and how did I manage that?! I was in awe that I had actually done what millions of other women had done, given birth and now an added responsibility of 'mommy' in my life ahead!

I like to walk around my apartment naked. I like sitting around in the nude watching sports, actually.

Always wear a smile sometime during the day - it makes you feel happier and look younger.

What you want to worship above youth, I think, is beauty, and beauty is so beyond just appearances after a while. Because you can be with someone who's good-looking; if they open their mouths and they're an idiot, then they cease to be beautiful very quickly.

Everything we have today that's cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, 'The good outnumber you, and we always will.'

I'm still very much an atheist, except that I don't necessarily see religion as being a bad thing. So, that's a weird thing that I'm struggling with that seems to be offending both atheists and people that are religious.

I've had some pretty good arguments with people, but I've never regretted it. I've had people come up where it's all emotion and no fact. That's always sad.

I've gotten very cynical and kind of anhedonic about all the things I have to do to get to do comedy: all the travel, hotels, and airports.

The love of beauty in its multiple forms is the noblest gift of the human cerebrum.

Religion brings to man an inner strength, spiritual light, and ineffable peace.

All of us, at certain moments of our lives, need to take advice and to receive help from other people.