"Toleration is the best religion."

"What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain."

"Conscience is God present in man."

"Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?"

"Without any doubt at all, teacher quality is the fundamental differentiator. Not just, incidentally, of education, but I would argue, probably the biggest single differentiator of success for the nations of the 21st Century."

"I'm an only child. Mostly raised by my father outside of Saratoga, doing martial arts and snowmobiling. I wore sweaters, jeans and sneakers. I was more interested in four-wheeling in the Catskills than doing my hair and makeup at 7 A.M. before school."

"After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper."

"I went to engineering school, which I thought was what I wanted to do, for about two weeks. We had an orientation class and we met this guy where he worked and stuff and it was cool, but I was like, 'There is no way this is going to be my life.'"