I hope that people around the world will be as inspired as I am to step up and to speak out on behalf of girls around the world who struggle to go to school.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

I want to make a policy statement. I am unabashedly in favor of women.

Now I do whatever I want.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

I like to work with artists from around the world. There are so many new inspiring filmmakers.

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

I was raised to be independent.

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function – that’s important, and fine, and I support it.

Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

A #2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere.

If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.

A leader is a dealer in hope.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.

If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

Not one person can make or break what I’m doing, except me or God.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 – and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‚We did it ourselves.‘

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.

Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I’m fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it’s amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.

I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

I always knew that St. Jude was an amazing organization but meeting the kids and seeing how the hospital works first hand was truly beautiful. It doesn’t feel like a regular hospital all dreary and sad. It’s a colorful, beautiful, comfortable, fun place to live and the energy is wonderful.

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.

Most of my songs have names of people I’ve met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

Only those who want everything done for them are bored.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

I hardly went to school.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

The more responsibility the Scoutmaster gives his patrol leaders, the more they will respond.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.