Salvation cannot be bought with the currency of obedience; it is purchased by the blood of the Son of God. Thinking that we can trade our good works for salvation is like buying a plane ticket and then supposing we own the airline. Or thinking that after paying rent for our home, we now hold title to the entire planet earth.

People are roasting each other at parties, at work events, around the fire. It's so fun. People are busting each other's chops, and it's a sign of affection, truly. It's a true test of love and friendship: can you make a man laugh at himself? So what makes a good burn? Go after targets you love and respect. And hit 'em hard.

After I released 'Jesus, Take the Wheel,' people started saying, Oh, it's kind of risky. You're coming out with a religious song. And I was thinking, Really? I grew up in Oklahoma; I always had a close relationship with God. I never thought it was risky in the least. If anything, I thought it was the safest thing I could do.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, 'Oh, I forgot that bit,' then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you've figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

My childhood dream was to study mechanical engineering. After reading 'The Mysterious Island' - which I read 25 times as a boy - I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that.

The more you create, the more ambitious you become with your projects. Short films were a direct result of over 200 web series sketches and vlogs. After you create enough 2-minute videos, you start to wonder what else there is. Deadlines and discipline and quantity with a focus on quality have always been what keeps me going.

I am mean; I'm nasty at times. I don't feel like talking to people at times. When I am in a bad mood and have had a really awful day, don't come in my face because I am not tolerant and I am not a goddess; I can't handle it after a point. I am going to get up, and I am going to scream, and I am going to say bad things to you.

I think I went through my phase of feeling sort of invisible when I left my small hometown in Canada and moved to the big city of Vancouver. I kind of had to decide right there in that moment what I was going to do with the rest of my life and make a thousand decisions after finishing high school. Fortunately, I chose acting.

When I was a kid I watched Steve Nash, Jason Kidd, Allen Iverson - all these great point guards. But then when I was 14, 15-years-old I found a similar guy who played like me - Beno Udrih. He's lefty too and he played in my hometown so I was a huge fan of his. Then after awhile I saw Manu Ginobili when he was playing in Italy.

I am a teacher. It's how I define myself. A good teacher isn't someone who gives the answers out to their kids but is understanding of needs and challenges and gives tools to help other people succeed. That's the way I see myself, so whatever it is that I will do eventually after politics, it'll have to do a lot with teaching.

I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.

My high school, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, showed me that anything is possible and that you're never too young to think big. At 15, I worked as a computer programmer at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. After graduating, I attended Stanford for a degree in economics and computer science.

Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don't have to obey their own laws. In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want - not only you, your whole family and all people like you.

There was a lot of criticism in Boston that we weren't going to spend money on the Red Sox after we did the Liverpool transaction. Then there was the fear we wouldn't spend in Liverpool. Hopefully the fans of both clubs will eventually see what we see clearly - that there is nothing to fear from the existence of the other club.

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.

The biggest thrill a ballplayer can have is when your son takes after you. That happened when my Bobby was in his championship Little League game. He really showed me something. Struck out three times. Made an error that lost the game. Parents were throwing things at our car and swearing at us as we drove off. Gosh, I was proud.

My dad spent most of the '50s and early '60s actually acting as sort of an advance man for the Justice Department, as a civil rights lawyer. So it was actually reading his papers after he passed away a few years ago that first started me thinking about this... What fraction of your life do you spend in service to your fellow man?

When I first came up in the wrestling business, there was a movie called 'The California Dolls' about a female tag team - girls who are struggling trying to make it in the wrestling world. I started out in a tag team, and my name was Britani Knight, and my dad named us after The California Dolls. We were called The Norfolk Dolls.

If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don't have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of 'The Giver'; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.

There are many lessons people can learn about the left. One of the key lessons is they never give anything up. Once they begin a quest, they don't stop until they've got it. The other thing that you need to learn is, they're never happy even after they succeed. They are never happy because there can never be enough to satisfy them.

There are people who literally cannot start a project until the deadline is four hours away, even if it's a big one. And those people have a serious problem. My recommendation is set up mini-deadlines. You might say, 'Okay, here's my deadline after three days for this and there's another deadline for that and then a third deadline.'

I walked around feeling, in a sense, that people of color, we began at the bottom of a slave ship. We were enslaved; we picked cotton. There was Honest Abe, who wore a top hat and was taller than anyone and who said, 'Enough is enough; slavery must end.' And then, black people could stand up again. But after that, we didn't catch up.

We are in the middle of a big swamp of ignorance that is taught by a lot of nonsense, propaganda, absurdity, amalgams. I have a hard time listening to any speech. You feel like you want to stop the TV every two seconds to rephrase them, because it's lie after lie, turning stuff upside down, and you can't follow that. That's the trap.

After the Republican Party did everything that Colin Powell says it needs to do to grow, and nominated the very kind of candidate he wanted in 2008, what did Powell do? He endorsed Obama! So according to the Drive-Bys and David Gergen, Republicans should let somebody who campaigned and voted for Obama, tell us how to build our party.

I'm one of those introverted people who simply feels a lot better after spending time alone thinking through ideas and emotions. This is a sign, I've come to think, of a kind of emotional disturbance - a reaction to inner fragility. I wish I were more able to just act and do, rather than constantly have to retreat and examine and think.

In 1984, when I was a rookie member of the House, there was a bill introduced to make Martin Luther King's birthday a state holiday. It didn't have a chance. As time passed, though, more and more states adopted the holiday. Finally, after about five years, we passed it and, I think, almost unanimously. As I said, change is slow and hard.

At the Cruiserweight Classic finale, I said... I don't know if people had looked it up, or if they had heard it before, but it was an old Zen proverb. 'Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, you chop wood, carry water.' It can be interpreted a lot of ways, but for the most part it's about staying in the moment.

My first 'Daily Show' piece was pretending I had this terrible immigrant journey, so I went to talk to an immigration lawyer who would help out people, and I ran into him in Penn Station about three months after I'd gotten the green card. I said, 'I got my green card yesterday.' And he hugged me because he understood that level of relief.

Bill Clinton fascinates me because, at the time, it seemed like his shenanigans and the people after him were the biggest political stories you could ever imagine. I remember when the 'Starr Report' was published in the newspaper, all of us were reading it in the high-school cafeteria, and a dean started taking the newspapers away from us.

Earlier, my priority was only work. I worked like a dog before I got married. After marriage, once you have a baby, time management is difficult. Your responsibilities change, your priorities change. And you have to concentrate on them if you have to work out your life. Your career is just a part of your life. For me, my family is my life.

With 'Scratch,' you create computer programs by snapping together graphical programming blocks, much like LEGO bricks, without any of the obscure syntax and punctuation of traditional programming languages. After creating an interactive 'Scratch' project, you can share it on the 'Scratch' website, just as you would share videos on YouTube.

Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I've never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line's always been really blurred for me. I'll hang out with them after the show. I'll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I'll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes.

I think the debating thing actually helped to establish to me that being popular was completely worthless. I didn't enjoy the social dynamic and immediately left after becoming number one. But it felt like I needed to do it to know what it was like. It wasn't just that I was an aggressive person, although that probably is true to an extent.

People who supported Obama felt like they formed a relationship, that they were being spoken to. The way that campaign worked and the way he's worked during his first term is to make people feel like he's grasping their hand, whether it's by tweeting or email, moments after an event, sometimes during an event. It makes people relate to him.

When I was in the hospital they gave me apple juice every morning, even after I told them I didn't like it. I had to get even. One morning, I poured the apple juice into the specimen tube. The nurse held it up and said, 'It's a little cloudy.' I took the tube from her and said, 'Let me run it through again,' and drank it. The nurse fainted.

I want to be remembered as the man who changed the pay scale for featherweights, who put the sparkle back in boxing after Muhammad Ali left, the man who took risks with his ring entrance, the man who, before the fight, would do a front flip into the ring without even thinking about turning an ankle, and then knocking his man out. I mean out.

When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.

I left my husband a year after 9/11. Not because he was an American and I an Egyptian, nothing to do with culture or religion, nothing to do with 9/11. We brought out the worst in each other. But before we separated, we visited N.Y.C. one more time together for a friend's engagement, and we went to pay our respects at the site of the attacks.

More than 150 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, slavery is illegal almost everywhere. But it is still not abolished - not even here, in the land of the free. On the contrary, there is a cancer of violence, a modern-day slavery growing in America by the day, in the very places where we live and work. It's called human trafficking.

Bushmaster was such a great adversary, and Mustafa Shakir, just the way that he embodies him in terms of the power of the voice, the stillness, and then, at the same time, when they do get after it, when he does fight, just how kinetic he was. He just brought a great dynamic and being able to explore his history in making the character Jamaican.

I lived in Tokyo for four months. I've heard Tokyo was modeled after New York City, so I was ready for the subways and all the people, but it's a little overwhelming at times. Not to mention, I'm paying twice as much for my apartment here than I was paying in L.A., and my apartment in L.A. is about four times the size! But it's such a cool city.

What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling victories in the late '60s and in the '70s where the whole legal framework for responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called 'command-and-control' pieces of legislation.

They used to call me Firefly when I was a little girl, and I always tried to figure out why I was being called a firefly. I was really black, black, black from the sun. After being in Jamaica for 13 years, my eyes were really beady and white, and my skin was really black. I must have really looked like a fly. My eyes looked like lights, like stars.

Share This Page