The credit of my good upbringing goes to my mother, who's not only been a single parent to my brother and I, but she's also been 'our' manager for the longest time. Our father, on the other hand, remained elusive and away from the family for most part of our lives, which left a certain void but also made us creative and reflective.

My grandfather was a wealthy and respected merchant in Montclair, New Jersey, where I was born. But his estate was wiped out in the Great Depression, and as a result, I had what I consider the ideal upbringing: We were a proud family, good citizens, and we didn't have a sou.

I have learned so many things from my mother about the right upbringing, the right values, value for money, value for elders, for family members. I think these things only a parent can teach you.

My values stemmed from the family. Anything I have achieved in life has been rooted in my upbringing.

These past years, as we have been recovering and given our city a rebirth, we have been encouraged by our faith, knowledge, and steadfast belief that we will pull through. There will be challenges and setbacks, as there have already been, but we will continue, and we the citizens of New Orleans will prevail in bringing our city back.

Where I stand comes from my upbringing and my faith: I'm 100 percent pro-life and I believe in traditional marriage.

It always helps to have a bit of prayer in your back pocket. At the end of the day, you have to have something, and for me, that is God, Jesus, my Catholic upbringing, my faith.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

So, obviously, on International Women's Day, we are honoring the achievements of women, but gender equality and feminism cannot evolve in our humanity if we're not bringing our boys and men along.

When Landon Carter, a Virginia plantation owner, read the Declaration of Independence two days after it was issued, he wondered whether its ringing affirmation of equality meant that slaves must be freed. If so, he confided to his diary, 'You must send them out of the country, or they must steal for their support.'

Evan Wolfson is a dear friend of mine. Almost more than any other, Evan is responsible for bringing the issue of marriage equality to the forefront of our struggle for civil rights. He is a courageous pioneer who has been relentless in this battle for marriage equality.

The idea of bringing equality not just to entertainment but to every walk of life - I think it's very important.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

The problem with holistic management is it's so profoundly simple, but it's not easy. And it's profoundly simple. You're almost insulting people's intelligence to explain it twice, just about making better decisions of where you want to go in your life, bringing in environmental, social, economic issues simultaneously.

A social impact bond is a new way of bringing financing into social and environmental support issues.

I worked as a draftsman for the Department of Environmental Protection, and as a teacher, in N.Y.C.; at a big bank and a small ad agency, a tiny law firm and a few giant ones; as a cashier and a dishwasher; preparing deli sandwiches and stringing tennis racquets and pruning evergreens into conical Christmas-tree shapes.

Bringing GIS into schools gets the kids very excited and indirectly teaches them different components of STEM education. That's been illustrated at school after school.

My imagination completely controls me, and forever feeds the fire that burns with dark red light in my heart by bringing me the best dreams. I've always had a wild imagination, a big heart and a tortured soul so I feel that dark fantasy, love and horror are in my blood.

When you have little girls bringing you your action figures for you to sign, it's like, 'Wow, things are happening, and dreams do come true.'

The past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.

For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.

Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death.

If you keep dating and keep out there, you keep a higher level of hope, and also, your skills at doing it improve because you're doing it more often, and you are bringing less anxiety to the table.

Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.