Their Quotes

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

Men take only their needs into consideration - never their abilities.

People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.

I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.

I never yet feared those men who set a place apart in the middle of their cities where they gather to cheat one another and swear oaths which they break.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!

The faults of a superior person are like the sun and moon. They have their faults, and everyone sees them; they change and everyone looks up to them.

The American people on the ground need a clearer, stronger, Lyndon B. Johnson-type voice from their president. Obama has that voice. It has to be used.

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.

People are like stained - glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

Millions of young Americans have graduated from college during the Obama presidency, ready to use their gifts and get moving in life. Half of them can't find the work they studied for, or any work at all. So here's the question: Without a change in leadership, why would the next four years be any different from the last four years?

In order to fix Social Security, we must restructure it so that we continue to provide for our Nation's seniors that are approaching retirement age, but allow for younger taxpayers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in private accounts.

The American people I talk to don't spend every moment thinking, 'How can I tax my neighbor more than they're being taxed?' They say, 'How can I get a good job? How can my kids get good jobs? How can seniors have a confidence in their future when they know that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt?'

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

But there's no substitute for a full-time dad. Dads who are fully engaged with their kids overwhelmingly tend to produce children who believe in themselves and live full lives.

People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

I was very pushed to look a certain way and act a certain way, and it wasn't me, but I played by their rules to get my foot in the door.

If our soldiers are not overburdened with money, it is not because they have a distaste for riches; if their lives are not unduly long, it is not because they are disinclined to longevity.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.

Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.