The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society.

Most people are basically a victim of the circumstances of their life. They have things like 9/11, they have terrorism threats, they have new war threats, they have economy problems, and they think, ‚What can I do? I’m basically a victim.‘

Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States‘ response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.

I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.

What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.

Anyone that’s involved in development has discovered that all the good work that’s been done in development has been undone by the AIDS emergency.

Most Americans think there’s already universal background checks. They don’t understand why there wouldn’t be a background check to purchase a weapon.

We don’t want two-tier people in America. Those who are legal but not citizens, and citizens.

Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.

We want our marriage to be a triumph, not a tragedy.

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

The American people abhor a vacuum.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of an individual. If the people remember me as a good teacher, that will be the biggest honour for me.

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community.

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.

I don’t want to make money; I want to make a difference.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama’s entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It’s not academic for me.

Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

I said I would never wear my gold again because it would be insensitive and disrespectful to all the people who died and lost everything in Katrina.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.