Massachusetts children cannot only lead the nation in test scores they can be competitive with the best in the world. And the gap in achievement among races can virtually disappear.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The price of success is hard work dedication to the job at hand and the determination that whether we win or lose we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.

Personality is more important than beauty but imagination is more important than both of them.

Shortly thereafter some friends encouraged me to try out for the Miss South Carolina World beauty pageant. To my surprise I won - and was sent to New York City to compete nationally.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off the belief it inspires is what counts.

Congress has an obligation to protect our country's natural beauty embodied in our nation's parks rivers and breathtaking landscapes.

We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.

The concept of active cooperation has taken the place of opposition to the new form of government and of dreamy resignation entranced with the beauty of times past.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly well-ordered or confused.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics nor all logic but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

Facts which at first seem improbable will even on scant explanation drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts as for that subtle something that quality of air that emanation from old trees that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty justice and happiness which are everything in this world.

We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who are impelling to renounce that past.

In Scotland over many years we have cultivated through our justice system what I hope can be described as a 'culture of compassion.' On the other hand there still exists in many parts of the U.S. if not nationally an attitude towards the concept of justice which can only be described as a 'culture of vengeance.'

The war changed everybody's attitude. We became international almost overnight.

I am shocked by the easy attitude of many in the media towards disclosing our Nation's secrets.

The attitude of independence toward a constructed language which all national speakers must adopt is really a great advantage because it tends to make man see himself as the master of language instead of its obedient servant.

I cannot say that the attitude of the United Nations always is for the Israeli attitude. Israel I think has been under severe attacks by members of the United Nations many times.

I went to England in the '70s and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.