The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them.

The appreciative smile the chuckle the soundless mirth so important to the success of comedy cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

We all have times when we go home at night and pull out our hair and feel misunderstood and lonely and like we're falling. I think the brain is such that there is always going to be something missing.

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then and it is misremembered now.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

President Barack Obama has stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history. And that my friends is one inconvenient truth that will haunt this President throughout history.

Thankfully President Obama has stood firmly behind women's health care issues by supporting coverage for contraception and reaffirming commitment to organizations like Planned Parenthood.

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood.

A battle lost or won is easily described understood and appreciated but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection as well as observation to appreciate it.

Truth is I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you and were tender with you and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you and disputed passage with you?

To be great is to be misunderstood.

While all other sciences have advanced that of government is at a standstill - little better understood little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.

Just think of what Woodrow Wilson stood for: he stood for world government. He wanted an early United Nations League of Nations. But it was the conservatives Republicans that stood up against him.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something sometime in your life.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist a woman in the audience stood up and said 'Yes but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?

The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.

When I was playing before I retired I never really understood the appreciation and the respect that people gave me. People had treated me like a god or something and that was very embarrassing.

I was the true future. I understood Communism better than they did.

In Italy I had an Afro and a lot of the kids came up and felt my hair. It really was funny. I wish I had understood Italian.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.

One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.