Growing up in Nashville especially in a music business family means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.

With all the knowledge and skill acquired in thousands of flights in the last ten years I would hardly think today of making my first flight on a strange machine in a twenty-seven mile wind even if I knew that the machine had already been flown and was safe.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants crowded together around the Hill blackening the ground that you begin to see the whole beast and now you observe it thinking planning calculating. It is an intelligence a kind of live computer with crawling bits for its wits.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in of course and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house that was done many thousands of years ago.

In Afghanistan there is a plan to build democracy hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.

And that's actually the brunt of what we do is people going straight from their workplace straight from home straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.

Now I know there are many Americans who say 'Get out of Afghanistan. Bring 'em all home.' And there are others who say 'Put in hundreds of thousands of more.'

Classes struggle some classes triumph others are eliminated. Such is history such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

Great Britain had a much different situation than we do and did here in the United States in that they had literally thousands of infected animals with human health risks. Their infectivity in this disease happened before very much was known about it.

Jobs are disappearing from every sector of the economy from engineering to health care workers forcing hundreds of thousands of families into unemployment and low-paying jobs.

We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis maternal mortality AIDS malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.

We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart consumerist choices about their own health care.

With the loss of Free Choice Vouchers hundreds of thousands of workers will now be forced to choose between their employers' unaffordable insurance or going without health care.

Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success.

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths which come about us like birds seeking inlet but we are shut up to them and so they bring us nothing but sit and sing awhile upon the roof and then fly away.

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can learn what we can improve the solutions and pass them on.

In closing I wish to say that while I was sorely beset by a number of white riders in my racing days I have also enjoyed the friendship of countless thousands of white men whom I class as among my closest friends.

In our house we repeated the pattern of thousands of other homes. There were a few books and a lot of music. Our food and our furniture were no different from our neighbors'.

In Los Angeles as I gained and lost celebrity then gained it again I often found myself wondering why I out of thousands like me had become famous.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.

We have a president who stole the presidency through family ties arrogance and intimidation employing Republican operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands of blacks elderly Jews and other minorities.

The marriage of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution honored in all cultures and by every religious faith. It's in this institution that children are meant to be nurtured. We know this after thousands of years of human experience.

Many thousands of youth have been deprived of the benefit of education thereby their morals ruined and talents irretrievably lost to society for want of cultivation: while two parties have been idly contending who should bestow it.