I'm a believer in forgiveness. I have worked with people who have been in gangs and now dedicate their lives to helping inner city kids. I've run offender services with teachings of responsibility, empathy and understanding of the victims at their heart. I've seen people change.
If you've ever made change in the offering plate, you might be a redneck.
Tragically, no industry has done more to block crucial action to address climate change than the oil industry.
One lesson I got from Gandhi, 'Be the change you want to see,' haunts me. I just feel like I can't keep stomping around pointing the finger at BP when I am supporting the oil industry with my very own dollars and actions by buying their products, helping to pay their mortgage - plastic is from oil... polyester, shower curtains.
The old adage that you shouldn't change a winning team doesn't apply in modern international football because managers have to study the opposition and pick players who exploit their weaknesses.
I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can't get out.
People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'
We have a powerful potential in out youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends.
I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.
I have this idea of myself that I decided when I was 12 about who I am and how I come across and what the world is like. And if I have changed or the world has changed, I don't even notice sometimes because I'm holding on to these old ideas. I am more confident - the music is proof. But I can see the change there much easier than I do as a human.
Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before.
We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely... change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.
We live in a world where racism hasn't changed at all. It's that old thing of, you know, the more things change, the more things remain the same.
I'm not sure I want to preserve the old ways just for the sake of saying, 'I don't believe in change.'
Clinging to old ways and fighting change is not the answer.
Even my older brothers' early success 10 years ago didn't change me since there was such an age difference.
God's word is always effective and produces whatever it expresses. My words, on the contrary, cannot create anything; I can only change what already is into something else.
The motto of my institute has always been, 'If they can see it, they can be it.' And it's literally true. If we show something on-screen, it will change what happens in real life.
I'm never in the same place for more than, like, three days at a time. Things can change from one minute to the next.
I just woke up one morning, and I painted my Maybach red - I wrapped it, matter of fact, red - and I thought, 'I might as well change my album to 'Still Brazy' 'cause I gotta be real with myself.'
