“Classic Christmas cookies are really time-consuming. Instead, make a bar you can bake in a pan and just cut up, like a brownie or a blondie or a shortbread, which still has that Christmas vibe.”

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, ‘Just watch!’

A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both.

When you’re not practicing, someone somewhere is. And when the two of you meet, assuming roughly equal ability, the other person will win.

Tax (reform) is ultimately a decision about values.

Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.

Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.

Basketball can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish impulses.

Working with the UN’s diplomacy and development arms, we can prevent minor differences from escalating into wars.

When you make speeches you elicit expectations against which you will be held accountable.

There has never been a great athlete who died not knowing what pain is.

When conflicts do break out, UN peacekeepers should play a role in defusing and settling them. Without giving up our sovereignty, we can help the UN with better training and better command and control in order to develop more effective peacekeeping forces.

The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices

Leaders should be collaborative, modest, and generous

When the playing is over, one can sense that one’s youth has been spent playing a game, and now both the game and youth are gone.

I like the rough impersonality of New York … Human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions-all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again.

We realized that no one of us could be as good as all of us playing unselfishly.

I’m one of those people that will walk into a bar, and if I wasn’t a comic – because some people know who I am – I would just blend in.

I am invisible in gay bars.

I like to play in the low 70’s. If it gets any hotter than that I’ll stay in the bar!

Michael Jackson was not an artist who comes along once in a decade, a generation, or a lifetime. He was an artist who comes along only once, period… He raised the bar and then BROKE the bar!

Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.

I’m not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying ‘Hi’ is going to be even more difficult because they won’t know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen.

The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.