It's that enthusiasm, that passion for what you're doing, that is most important.

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.

We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.