Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves.

Say this much for big league baseball - it is beyond question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it - this is a hard lesson.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made

There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.

Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings.

A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.

Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

When one is different, the answers have to come from within.

A lot of things in nature answers to increase which is a law of nature

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

The most meaningless term in the English language is "I take full responsibility." When a politician utters those words it means absolutely nothing.

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

From out of pain, beauty.

The U.S. must renounce any U.S. interest in constructing permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq.

I esteem death a trifle, if not caused by guilt.

The beauty of life is in people who feel some obligation to enhance life. Without that, we're only half alive.

The big thing I tell my kids is you have to control how you label things. It's very important to me they understand the power they have to create the lives that they want.