My goal was not to be famous or rich but to be good at what I did. And that required going to New York and studying and working in the theater.

There's so many things I want to do. I want to work with great filmmakers great actors great scripts. And there's no reason for me to do anything short of that because I'm 24 I don't have a family I don't need to make tons of money and I'm not dying to get famous.

All is amiss. Love is dying faith's defying heart's denying.

If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

I don't think it's too hippie to want to clean up the planet so you don't wind up dying of some kind of cancer when you're 45 years old. It enrages me that these big cancer-research organizations can't be bothered to man the front lines of environmental protest.

In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice theory humanities. And nowadays music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.

Many seventh graders I know in Illinois as well as around the Nation are studying the Constitution. I was pretty impressed with the quality of education our children are receiving because they had not expected me to ask them about it.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.