On the Road

A Few Words of Inspiration
(Or, Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Pop Culture)

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
- Robert Thurman

"Is anybody ALIVE out there tonight?!"
- Rev. Bruce Springsteen

"You lost today, kid, but that doesn't mean you have to like it."
- Fedora to young Indiana Jones,
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

"This above all: To thine own self be true."
- Billy Shakespeare,
Hamlet, Act I Scene III

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did."
- Thomas Edward Lawrence,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

"The idea was that we write our own material because we couldn't really do anyone else's. That's the risk we took. At the start we were criticized for using our own material, but we were making mistakes whereas established groups weren't. They were taking the safe way out... The only way to go is to make the mistakes."
- Bono

"So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labor, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night - are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this."
- Victor Hugo,
preface to Les Miserables, 1862

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