People are always pleased to indulge their religiosity when it allows them to stand in judgment of someone else, licenses them to feel superior to someone else, tells them they are more righteous than someone else. They are less enthusiastic when religiosity demands that they be compassionate to someone else. That they show charity, service and mercy to everyone else.

Don't nobody like a man they can't figure.

Failure is the price of excellence.

Too often our leaders cannot work for the greater good because they acknowledge no good greater than politics. But if that's truly our prime directive and highest imperative, God help us all.

We take fabulousness for granted sometimes. We forget what hard work it is. Indeed, when you consider the grueling hours your average celebrity puts in on the movie set and in the recording studio, when you think of them returning to their mansions so dead tired their drivers have to help them out of the car, well, it just makes you want to cry.

Any work of art represents a series of conscious choices on the part of the artist - what color to paint, what note to play, what word to use - in that artist's attempt to share what is in his or her soul. The audience is free to accept or reject those choices; it is emphatically not free to substitute its own.

Do that which serves your cause, not that which serves your rage.