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Milton Friedman

Nobel Prize in Economics

I had a teacher in high school who was really somehow -- I think he taught government or political science, something like that, whatever you call it in high school -- but he also taught Euclidian geometry, plane geometry, simply because he liked it as such a beautiful, intellectual discipline. And I took his course, and one point or another, he got rhapsodizing about the beauty of geometry, and he quoted the last lines of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "Truth is beauty, beauty is truth. That is all you know, and all you need to know." And those two lines stuck with me. I was about, probably 12 or 13 at the time. And they have stuck with me ever since, because they so much reflected the sort of feeling I had about the geometry, as well, and about mathematics in general, that its appeal is one of beauty, kind of an intellectual purity and beauty. And now, I'm sure that was what drove me into the direction of thinking I wanted to make mathematics my lifetime work.
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Milton Friedman

Nobel Prize in Economics

Milton Friedman: I think the most important single thing in people's success is whether they are lucky enough to be able to earn their living at doing something that, if they could afford to, they would do without any pay. I think the most unlucky people in the world are those who have to earn their living by doing something in which they would not voluntarily work overtime.
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Carlos Fuentes

Author, Scholar & Diplomat

Carlos Fuentes: It's like walking, or singing in the bathtub. It comes naturally. It is there. I was writing -- indeed, at seven, I was writing my own magazine in the apartment building in Washington, and circulating it through all seven stories. I did it myself. News, movie reviews, reviews of books I had read. I mean, who cared? I cared. But it's a vocation that was there for me from the earliest time, the earliest age. Then it sort of spawned out into other activities, but always the center, the core of my life has been writing. The proof is that I have more than 20 books. I wrote them some time, huh?
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Carlos Fuentes

Author, Scholar & Diplomat

One epiphany which I will never forget is reading Kafka's Metamorphosis. I must have been 17. And that really burned through my heart and my mind. I remember I started smacking the light bulb, I was so excited. I think the world was turning around me. "See! This you can do with literature! If you can write this, that's all you want from life. You want nothing more."
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Millard Fuller

Founder, Habitat for Humanity International

Millard Fuller: Prior to leaving business, our lives had gone in separate ways, and we really became strangers to each other. After we left business and decided that we would seek a common path, and let that path be God's path for our lives, we worked together, and we've always worked together from that point until this day. And the children were involved in it. We were together. We did things together, and it was exciting. And even though, instead of driving a Lincoln Continental she was riding a motor bike, she was riding a motor bike as a happy woman, not a frustrated woman. She was a fulfilled woman, and she had her child on the back of the motor bike, and they were having an adventure. For a kid, it's more fun to be on the back of a motor bike than it is in the back seat of a Lincoln. And we were taking trips down to the Zaire River in a river boat, and we would go out and get sand out of -- I mean, it was -- in fact, one of our kids said to us recently -- she said, "Daddy, how could we ever thank you for how you raised us?" It was a thrilling moment, because our kids had a storybook childhood. We went to see the gorillas together in the forest. We floated down the Zaire River. We went and had picnics at the Botanical Garden. We dug out ant hills, and made blocks, and painted houses, and the kids had an adventure. We all had an adventure. We climbed a volcanic mountain together and camped out on the rim of the volcano. It was a marvelous experience that we had as a couple, and that we had together with our kids.
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