There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.

The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

A Harris poll I've seen says only 12 percent of the electorate names taxes as one of the most important issues facing the nation. Voters put tax cuts dead last, behind education, Social Security, health care, Medicare and poverty.

I went to drama school in England, and you spend your first year working on the muscles surrounding the vocal mechanisms. You learn how you support it and create characters through your voice so that became an obsession. So I went to Hollywood thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to be one of the great voice-over artists.'

My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

Many things embarrass me, but reading isn't one of them. I'm not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.