“Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.”

There is no excuse for not trying.

Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.

The opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.

Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

When times get tough, we don’t give up. We get up.

The future must not belong to those who bully women. It must be shaped by girls who go to school and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up.

Yes We Can!

Hope – Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

It is moments like these that force us to try harder, and dig deeper, and to discover gifts we never knew we had – to find the greatness that lies within each of us.

In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a prerequisite.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

I wouldn’t be the man I am today without the woman who agreed to marry me 20 years ago

A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.

The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is this – a movie star will say, ‘How can I change the script to suit me?’ and a movie actor will say. ‘How can I change me to suit the script?’

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

I pray to give thanks and to recognize all the good things that are in my life even during times of great change, confusion, or frustration.

It’s not easy to see things from the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes.

I don’t know if I was as ambitious as to change the world, but I do feel like – the reason why I called the album “Our Version of Events” was that I feel a lot of people are not represented in pop music and popular culture.

A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Forms do change, yet the essence stays the same.