You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you'd experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it.

Experience has taught me when I am shaving of a morning to keep watch over my thoughts because if a line of poetry strays into my memory my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

Experience is the child of thought and thought is the child of action.

I thought I was gonna be an attorney so I went to Dartmouth and I was a government major and I minored in environmental policy and I didn't do anything academically around the arts.

One of the things that I've always thought I would like to do is to develop an environmental index. Then people can measure their own environmental performance on an index as they do in other ways.

I always thought we had an environmental problem but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

I thought if anyone need a leg up it was our foster children. So I started getting involved in education reform and that was back in 1998. And as a result of all the reform work that I had done people urged me to run for the Minnesota state Senate. I did I was there for six years.

When the state or federal government control the education of all of our children they have the dangerous and illegitimate monopoly to control and influence the thought process of our citizens.

And I thought that was the best way for me to participate because standing in the crowd and listening is a fantastic education but it's not my nature. I need to be involved. So I did that instead.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans acquiring discipline organizing thoughts devoting attention to detail and learning to be self critical.