There are unknown forces in nature when we give ourselves wholly to her without reserve she lends them to us she shows us these forms which our watching eyes do not see which our intelligence does not understand or suspect.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

Had I not come out with an inspirational CD you perhaps would have never known that I feel like I feel that all songs all the music I've ever done is a gift from God.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known using that as scaffolding and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

Throughout history great leaders have known the power of humor.

There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor and that he has never known trouble.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity no humor no overstatement can quite extinguish the physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

There is nothing so well known as that we should not expect something for nothing - but we all do and call it Hope.

For me Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.