To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

I don't want to make promises, not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out.

Let us join together across denominations, religions and cultures to make a habit of empathy and reach out to those most in need. To share the blessings we enjoy and to advance the cause of peace in all corners of our world.

I want to control our own energy by developing oil and natural gas but also the energy sources of the future.

I'm less interested in how we label ourselves. I'm more interested in how we treat each other. And if we're treating each other right, then I can be African-American, I can be multi-racial, I can be you name it, what matters is, am I showing people respect, am I caring for one, for other people.

I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream...he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

I think you need to have people around you who can remind you that, actually, what you just said makes no sense. Fortunately, I have my wife to do that continually.