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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
It started of course with rediscovering America and the frontier. And wide open spaces and pushing on out there to new territories and exploration, up and down. Exploration, it's just going beyond. It's going from the known to the unknown, the familiar to the unfamiliar. Getting out of the comfortable path. Just pushing on, I think that's what exploration is all about. Just going beyond the point at which you are now. Whether it's physically taking a body out there, or pressing on to new realms of science, or new realms of human performance, such as the arts, or athletics.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
The Constitution is not just a parchment to be saluted on the Fourth of July. It's a document that gives you living rights and responsibilities which we should take hold of. Because democracy is like a coral reef; it's built up little by little by little. You look at it, and it looks so beautiful, but the reverse is true, too. It deteriorates little by little. When you don't stand up to someone who is abridging your rights, when you don't report someone who is violating the norms or the laws of the community -- and I'm not just talking about burglaries or vandalism, I'm talking about someone who basically coerces people against their Constitutional rights -- if you don't do that, next time, more of these misbehaving people are going to say, "We can get away with it. We got away with it last month, we can move even deeper into eroding people's rights." So it's important for young people to grow up learning their rights because if you don't know your rights, how are you going to use your rights? As my parents said, "If you don't use your rights, you are eventually going to lose your rights."
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Jessye Norman
Legendary Opera Soprano
Jessye Norman: The American Dream means to me that people who need the support that can only be given by a government, that they are given what is needed in order to live, not just to survive but to thrive. I am so exhausted from hearing this business about pulling one's self up by one's bootstraps. There are people in our country that are not wearing boots. And that not to understand that it is the responsibility of a society to look out for the least of us is, for me, a very wrong way of looking at life and living. The American Dream is realized only when we come to the point of understanding, when we see a person that is not doing very well in life, if we can understand that "there (but for) the grace of God go I," and that it is our responsibility to lend a hand, a hand up. People don't want a handout, they want a hand up. And the American Dream, to me, is understanding and participating in that. Not achieving something on one's own and letting that be all that happens in one's life, but to understand sometimes you need to reach back. Sometimes you've got to reach on the side and say, "Hey, come along. Don't be sad. This is going to work out. You'll never walk alone."
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