“‎Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.” 

“How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?” 

“Change has come!” 

“What matters is how well we have loved.” 

“the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.” 

“When you’re drowning you don’t think, I would be incredibly pleased if someone would notice I’m drowning and come and rescue me. You just scream.”

“For those of you in the cheap seats I’d like ya to clap your hands to this one; the rest of you can just rattle your jewelry!”

“War is over … If you want it.”

“How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?”

“Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.”

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

“Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.”

“There is an alternative to war. It’s staying in bed and growing your hair.”

“My defenses were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn’t know how to cry. Simple.”

“Well, I don’t want to be king, I want to be real.”

“One thing I can tell you is you have to be free. Come together, right now, over me.”

“You know the way people begin to look like their dogs? Well, we’re beginning to look like each other.”

“The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.”

“…Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I don’t know what will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. We’re more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

“Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder. I know we make our own reality, and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road, and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way — there’s a chance, and it’s very strange sometimes.”

“When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind.”

“Peace is not something you wish for; It’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.”

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”

“There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.”

“Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones.”

“Our values call upon us to care about the lives of people we will never meet.” 

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.” 

“I believe in (the American) people. I believe that people are more good than bad. I believe tragic things happen. I think there's evil in the world. But I think that at the end of the day, if we work hard, and if we're true to those things in us that feel true and feel right, that, the world gets a little better each time. That's what this presidency is trying to be about. And I see that in the young people i work with. This is not just drama-obama. This is what I really believe.” 

“Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity -- of schedules and pastimes ad the weather -- became their principal consolation.” 

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” 

“Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn't there before.” 

“You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.” 

“A healthy, dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It’s what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.” 

“In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?” 

“When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.” 

“If you want peace, you won’t get it with violence.”

“Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.”

“You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.”

“I never went to high school reunions. My thing is, out of sight, out of mind. That’s my attitude toward life. So I don’t have any romanticism about any part of my past.”

“Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible.”

“I believe Jesus was right, Buddha was right, and all of those people like that are right. They’re all saying the same thing — and I believe it. I believe what Jesus actually said — the basic things he laid down about love and goodness — and not what people say he said.”

“All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the Seventies who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music was just The Beatles redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees.”

“Everything is as important as everything else.”

“I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!”

“I don’t believe in yesterday, by the way.”

“A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, 'Huh. It works. It makes sense.” 

“We will not apologize for oour way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” 

“The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight - that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie - contained a good deal of truth.” 

“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.” 

“Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.”