Today 80 percent of all the oil that comes out of the Gulf is from 1 000 feet or more and today almost a third of it is more than 5 000 feet below the surface. What hasn't happened is the safety and the ability to respond to a negative event such as this blowout has been far outrun by the technology of drilling itself. We need to close that gap.

What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do yet this is the way technology tends to work.

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it it's for naught.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

The second and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic a scholar a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

The greatest teacher I know is the job itself.

So much of a professional athlete's success depends upon not necessarily the play itself but how he deals with... always saying how you deal with good is just as important as how you deal with bad.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination by itself would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

If everyone is moving forward together then success takes care of itself.

Death used to announce itself in the thick of life but now people drag on so long it sometimes seems that we are reaching the stage when we may have to announce ourselves to death. It is as though one needs a special strength to die and not a final weakness.