Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.

You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.

Real nobility is based on scorn courage and profound indifference.

Courage is found in unlikely places.

A couple days ago I saw a lot of people tweeting 'Oh it's so cool 'Home' is being used in the Olympics!' We don't really get to watch much TV man with the concerts every night but I wish I could have seen it. I really just found out through Twitter and my management texting me. I thought it was really awesome.

I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

I'm a big fan of all the Boston guys that are acting - Matt Damon Ben Affleck Mark Wahlberg - they made a great career out of it and they found a way to do it and still be cool guys so that's kind of where I want to be.

We found out the Gemini spacesuit was well oxygen was flowing to keep me cool as well as to breathe and it wasn't good enough. My visor got fogged.

I like men who are very cool but who are also so brilliant that they are almost insane. Sean Penn Gary Oldman Bob Dylan Tom Waits - men who would be flipping burgers if they hadn't found an outlet for their brilliant mind-sets.

Even as a kid if I would come across something cool in the record store that would be how I found out about bands. It's kind of the same way these days. In a way even less because there are no record stores to go to anymore.

I found out some really cool ways to swing around the Winchester.

I want kids of this generation to see that everything is cool that there's some kind of unity in hip-hop. We all found something that's really important to us and music is all we've really got.

With all of you men out there who think that having a thousand different ladies is pretty cool I have learned in my life I've found out that having one woman a thousand different times is much more satisfying.

The truth is - I found myself doing these huge action-adventure movies and um and which are cool man. And I really love doing them. And thankfully I haven't had too much dialogue because if I had I would have really made a mess of it. You know what I mean?

I've always been scared of advertising folk. I've met them at parties and I've been to their offices and I've always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.

My problem was that I was blond. There were no heroes with blond hair. Robert Taylor and Henry Fonda they all had dark hair. The only one I found was Van Johnson who wasn't too cool. He was a nice homely American boy. So I created my own image. It worked.

To me there is something superbly symbolic in the fact that an astronaut sent up as assistant to a series of computers found that he worked more accurately and more intelligently than they. Inside the capsule man is still in charge.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984.

That was when I realised that music is the most profound magical form of communication there is.

Eventually it is found out but it takes time especially in the conditions when communication is difficult when the enemy is making it extremely awkward for information to come out to go.

The level of communication you can achieve with an infant is really profound.

To succeed you will soon learn as I did the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy both verbal and numerical and communication skills.

But communication is two-sided - vital and profound communication makes demands also on those who are to receive it... demands in the sense of concentration of genuine effort to receive what is being communicated.