Sometimes you are lifted up to the mountaintop as a gift from the universe, so you can see what is possible. Then you are put down back at the bottom: Now you have to earn it for yourself.

If I'm honest with myself, I think it's probably true I have learned more in my life through pain than through joy. But hopefully that's changing.

Some people think it's naive to think we can make love our new bottom line. What I believe is naive is thinking human civilization as we know it will survive another two hundred years if we do not.

If I say to my daughter, "Go say `hi' to Aunt Gertrude," there is a reason there. I'm teaching her manners. I think the idea that she'll say `hi' to Aunt Gertrude only if she wants to is the biggest crock of silliness I've ever heard. Yet I meet people everyday who were clearly brought up to think that if they didn't want to say "hi" to Aunt Gertrude, that was fine.

I think the vast majority of Americans would have supported military action to stop the second plane from hitting the World Trade Center, if that had been possible. I would have been among them.

Once you reach a certain age, you're either slowly dying or slowly being reborn. I want to choose the latter.

The end does not justify the means. If we try to be someone we are not in order to achieve a result, then the result cannot help but be something other than what we intended.