A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.

When you start to write, things begin to come into focus in a way they don't when you're not writing. It's a very good way to find out how much you don't know because you learn specifically what you need to know that you don't know at the moment by writing.

Take the teacher not the course. Find out who the great professors are - the great teachers - and take their courses because a subject that you may not think you're interested in may turn out to be infinitely fascinating because of the way it's taught.

If everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.

Why limit yourself to the experience of your own relatively brief time on earth, according to your biological clock, when the whole realm of the human experience reaching back infinitely far is available to you?

Freedom is found through the portals of our nation's libraries.