I don't have to negotiate an arms agreement with Great Britain or with France.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

When I was a kid, I attended a small Catholic school in a south suburb of Chicago.

For all fragrances I create, I ask each of my suppliers to deliver and provide the best raw materials. It is my personal quest for excellence and quality to create luxury perfumes.

I am interested in garnering the white vote, and the black vote, and the Latin vote, and the Asian vote, and the business vote, and the labor vote.

When [Ralph Waldo] Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, 'What are you doing in there?' it was reported that Thoreau replied, 'What are you doing out there?'

I may cut my coat to follow fashion, sir, but not my conscience.

Whether we remain the ash or become the phoenix is up to us.

[F]or contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation.

I think there's no way they should have to teach [math] now. We have computers. We no longer need to know why 3x = 2y/4.

Chess sharpens the mind, stimulates concentration, improves the memory and promotes visualization.

But in my head I can hear Haymitch's smug, if slightly exasperated, words: "Yes, that's what I'm looking for, sweetheart.