Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home from my childhood are still with me.

I am a voyager - and the voyage cannot mean that I stay at home.

Child abuse and neglect offend the basic values of our state. We have a responsibility to provide safe settings for at-risk children and facilitate permanent placement for children who cannot return home.

The appreciative smile the chuckle the soundless mirth so important to the success of comedy cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

Basically I believe the world is a jungle and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and honestly I may as well just start it again now because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece but he cannot of course create it.

I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.

I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French.