For starters, this country embodies something utterly unique: History's first democratic empire. Beginning in the

post war era, we have used free trade and democracy to create a series of interlocking relationships that end war.
Armstrong Williams

The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows.
Emily Oster

I don't have to compete in the charts. I can just be myself as a musician, a songwriter and play with the musicians that I really love.
Elton John

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.
Annie Baker

I hope that there are no persons that would want to think ill of me in any direction or any behavior.
Diahann Carroll

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery

I don't really remember much about the '60s at all. You know, 1970 is the first year I remember pretty well.
Hank Azaria

The Boomers have modeled a set of bad habits, and one grand gesture is not going to unwind all those bad habits.
Eric Liu

Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.
Alan Moore

I would love to go on 'MasterChef'. But while I really like cooking, I'm doubtful anyone would ever want to pay for what I'd cooked.
Ed Balls

Gemeoss

Urban Outfitters - I love it. It's almost like Forever 21, but for, like, the

24- to 25-year-old girl, getting a little bit older. Keke Palmer I'm the kind of person that believes that I would like to be evaluated by my entire career and my entire life, not two words that I would misspeak and then later apologize for. Kirk Cameron I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses. Leonard Susskind Around age 11 or 12, I started playing jazz bass. From there, I went to electric bass and then guitar, which I kept up for a long time. Joshua Roman Space X's Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars with modules where earthlings can live. My teleporting technology is the number one way those individuals will get new information, new treatments of diseases that will occur on the planet, and new food sources. Craig Venter Brain cells are normally not sensitive to light. So by introdu...

In the next couple of years, part of every film's process is going to be

to adjust the images. And it'll be to change the color of an actor's tie or change the little smirky thing he's doing with his mouth. Or you can put in more clouds or move the tree a little bit. Robert Zemeckis There's a high school in Camden, New Jersey, I call the Jill Scott School. It's the Camden Creative Arts High School. Those teachers and kids are so passionate about what they do, and 98 percent of the senior class went on to college. Jill Scott I spent a good deal of time going back over my childhood, my midlife, to try to understand who I was. We're supposed to be complete and whole, and you can't be whole if you're trying to be perfect. Doing a life review helped me get over the disease to please. Jane Fonda For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American. Nora Roberts Well, you know I have an office, my film offices. So I...

Web searching and cellphone use both flourish in the wee hours. Before the dawn of

the web, I would stay up watching television. But there is something soporific about television: I would often nod off. Not so when I'm online. As technologies expand, these problems may only worsen. Sendhil Mullainathan To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin I'm the kind of person who likes to create the environment and mindset - not because I do it deliberately, but because that's how I like to live - where, from catering to makeup to hair to wardrobe, electricians, camera department lighting, sound, you know, it's our movie; we're together, and we have that camaraderie and that closeness. Steven Rodney McQueen There are examples of fraternal dictatorships, or one, anyway: the passing of power from Fidel to Raul Castro. Elliott...

I'm not a detail guy. I depend on accountants and administrators to do my detail

stuff for me, but I do know the overall picture and I know that if you put business people together in a room, not just politicians, they could shrink the deficit tremendously by good business tactics. John Paul DeJoria My inspiration was my mom. She's a great cook, and she still cooks, and we still banter back and forth about cooking. Growing up in a mostly Portuguese community, food was important and the family table was extremely important. At a very young age I understood that. Emeril Lagasse If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn't you feel that way now that he's President Obama? You know there's something wrong with the kind of job he's done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him. Mitt Romney Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about,...

IBM's long-standing mantra is 'Think.' What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place

for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues. Ginni Rometty I am going to get political on you. Because I am the most shallow person in the world, my mission is to see men's formal wear change a little bit. It is too rigid! Everybody looks like a penguin! Steven Cojocaru I was able to get operated on four days after I was diagnosed. It was just a matter of getting this baseball-sized tumor out of me. I reflect now on how lucky I was to be in the situation where I could get the best possible help and treatment. Eric Davis If it's time to party, it's time for hip hop. I love Drake, Jay-Z, Kanye. If I'm chilling at home though, I'm listening to Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, Radiohead, DJ Shadow. I also listen to a lot of classical. Alexis Knapp Indulging in unrestrained and immoderate laughter is a sign of intemperance, of a want of control over one's emotions, and of...

In orthodox film-making, you never shoot sequentially - but with improv, obviously every move you

make has a knock-on effect; it is a cumulative process. I have improvised, on the non-scripted 'Timecode.' It can become entirely indulgent: actors smashing crockery and competing verbally. Saffron Burrows Oh yeah - I watched Knife in the Water, saw the shot, and repeated it. But even if I hadn't seen that film, inevitably the camera would've ended up on top of that mast, I mean if you think of it there are only so many dynamic shots on a boat. Phillip Noyce I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened. Kazuo Ishiguro Some people come out going, I don't get it. And I don't quite know what they're trying to get, what they're struggling for. We have had the reaction where people leave the movie sor...

The Microsoft actions announced today are exactly the kinds of industry initiatives we need. Microsoft

is using its resources to bring real privacy protection to Internet users by creating incentives for more websites to provide strong privacy protection. William M. Daley I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed. Barbara Kruger To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot. Joseph Conrad When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman. Jean de la Bruyere I am committed to strengthening our agricultural economy by protecting the unique interests of small and medium size family farms so that they can continue to operate. Sue Kelly It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself. Johann Wolfgang von G...

We have become 99 percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and

within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts. George Washington Carver Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder. Abraham Lincoln My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated. Joyce Carol Oates It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous. Lynda Barry Certainly when, you know, you put a lot of creative people together, there's ego and tension and all that stuff comes into play. But on the flip side, there's a lot of camaraderie and closeness. Darren Star Nobody can understand the pressures of doing an hour-...

The economic dimension is very clear. I was at a dinner party, a mother got

up, who's a very distinguished scientist, and said she had to get home and help her daughter with her homework. The two waiters, their faces changed. They were working their second jobs, they couldn't get home to help their kids with homework. Donna Shalala The kind of doctor I want is one who when he's not examining me is home studying medicine. George S. Kaufman It is a wonderful thing to get married young and become a father. Benedict Cumberbatch Awareness has changed so that every act for children, every piece of legislation recognizes that children are part of families and that it is within families that children grow and thrive or don't. Bernice Weissbourd As a female pilot, the sacred rose garden in my heart is the motherland's blue sky. Liu Yang Fundamentals make the market. T. Boone Pickens I was always more interested in story songs, things with a point of view... and things that informed me. Nanci Griffith When I attained a certain advanced ...

Sense About Science is much more than an innocent fact-checking service. It is a spin-off

of a bizarre political network that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched 'Living Marxism' magazine in the late eighties. Zac Goldsmith For somebody for whom they're going to buy a certain amount of gas irrespective of the price, should they really spend so much time thinking about the price of gas? It doesn't affect anything they do. Sendhil Mullainathan Soon it won't be the Internet any more, it'll just be like air, like somehow they'll integrate the Internet into the air. And God's name will have ended up being 'Google,' because that's the way it worked out. It could have worked out that God's name ended up being 'Yahoo,' of course, but they lost out. Douglas Coupland Modern women are just bombarded. There's nothing but media telling us we're all supposed to be great cooks, have great style, be great in bed, be the best ...