Quotes About Inspiration

In his closing remarks, King spoke from a mountaintop, a prophet bringing word from on high. Lewis spoke more simply, from the valley, among the people whose burdens he knew because they were his burdens too.

Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.

Leadership, Jefferson was learning, meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.

was to shape them in her image: courageous, competitive, caring, and tireless.

Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic.

Well, what the hell is the presidency for?" he asked, if not to do the big things lesser men might not?

And I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault'—not 'leadership.'…I'll tell you what leadership is. It's persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. It's long, slow, tough work. That's the only kind of leadership I know—or believe in—or will

Hugh Liedtke had a simple rule of thumb: Pick a name that started with either A or Z, so you would be first or last in the telephone listings. With that in mind, the team chose Zapata Petroleum Corporation, after the Marlon Brando movie Viva Zapata!, which was playing in Midland.

we hear another president, impossibly young and dashing, his breath white in the inaugural air, telling us to ask not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country.

In a twenty-first-century hour when the presidency has more in common with reality television or professional wrestling, it's useful to recall how the most consequential of our past presidents have unified and inspired with conscious dignity and conscientious efficiency.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country's finest hours lay ahead.

His impulse," Winston Churchill had written of FDR in the mid-1930s, "is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land.

I knew that a President can appeal to the best in our people or the worst; he can call for action or live with inaction.

The capacity of music to reassure and to remind is one of its cardinal virtues.

So much of music builds on prior ideas and themes

points ahead, working for a common good. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.

passed the fundamental test of leadership: Despite all his shortcomings and all the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred, he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.

Yeah,' said Al. 'I'm very prone to boredom. I gotta go do something. Yeah. That's a fair statement. I'm not the most relaxed person in the world. My mind does not stop working all night.' 'Manipulative?' I said. 'I think you could describe that as leadership,' he said. 'Inspire! I think it's called leadership.

brilliant and audacious as ever — a beat poet of paranoia. He

As an adolescent, Vonnegut made my life bearable.

Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur.

You see Miss Gertrude is a genius. And a genius is a genius. So what if no one understands a word she writes. Some day they might.

I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.