Those minutes that I'm on stage are the best! Being there and looking at the crowd and seeing their faces hearing them sing the positive words from the songs.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

The days when the words 'Hollywood actor' framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate consultant pundit and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

Unfortunately poetry is not born in noise in crowds or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

I'm talking like 10 12 years old. Either junior brings Mom and Pop or Mom and Pop bring the kids. I'm talking young here not a college drinking crowd.

There were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded.

Leadership is diving for a loose ball getting the crowd involved getting other players involved. It's being able to take it as well as dish it out. That's the only way you're going to get respect from the players.

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

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.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

With the help of a friend I got father into a wagon when the crowd had gone. I held his head in my lap during the ride home. I believed he was mortally wounded. He had been stabbed down through the kidneys leaving an ugly wound.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions of real interests and materials is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Nor is it the least advantage to health accruing from such a way of life that it expose those who follow it to fewer temptations to vice than persons who live in crowded society.

The filth and noise of the crowded streets soon destroy the elasticity of health which belongs to the country boy.