I never wanted to get out of a place as much as I did to get out of the presidency.
Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.
I divide the word into learners and nonlearners. There are people who learn, who are open to what happens around them, who listen, who hear the lessons. When they do something stupid, they don't do it again. And when they do something that works a little bit, they do it even better and harder the next time. The question to ask is not whether you are a success or a failure, but whether you are a learner or a nonlearner.
I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and failures. . . I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.
Civility is a work of the imagination, for it is through the imagination that we render others sufficiently like ourselves for them to become subjects of tolerance and respect, if not always affection.
McWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafés like Harley-Davidson's and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle.
Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining.
Veganism has given me a higher level of awareness and spirituality, primary because the energy associated with eating has shifted to other areas. If you’re violent to yourself by putting [harmful] things into your body that violate its spirit, it will be difficult not to perpetuate that [violence] onto someone else.
If it doesn't work horizontally as prose. . . it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.
The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention.
I'm not sure a person ever really reveals the whole of himsels or herself to another person, and I'm not sure we should. Or rather, just because you don't, it doesn't mean you can't have a meaningful relationship with another person. It's important to remember that this idea of confessing your most shameful, embarrassing stories and self to someone else as an expression of love and intimacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a new definition of what it means to be close to someone. After all, the self is by its nature secretive.