I am going to take something I learned over in Israel. Their Independence Day is preceded the 24 hours before with Memorial Day so it gives them a chance to serve and reflect and then celebrate. I am going to try to start that tradition here in America.

No sane local official who has hung up an empty stocking over the municipal fireplace is going to shoot Santa Claus just before a hard Christmas.

So many people release albums before Christmas and they get lost in the Christmas rush.

I never really did Christmas before. Christmas Day? I mean - what's that? What's it all about? I was always flying on Christmas Day.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

I'm sure most of us remember being a kid and you have all of this endless time where two weeks before Christmas feels like ten years. I used to go to bed to try and go to sleep to try and make it go faster.

I'm bad on Valentine's Day but even worse on Christmas. I go shopping at nine o'clock on December 24th every year. Nobody else is there. I'm in Toys'R'Us all by myself. I get there five minutes before closing.

T'was the night before Christmas when all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse.

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly when they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky. So up to the house-top the coursers they flew with the sleigh full of toys and St. Nicholas too.

When you're a chef you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don't actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work the first thing I'll do and especially when I'm in New York I'll go for a run. And I'll run 10 or 15k on my - and I run to gain my appetite.

What are people going to do? Fire me? I've been fired before. Not book me? I've been out of work before. I don't care.

Before you start some work always ask yourself three questions - Why am I doing it What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions go ahead.

All things are difficult before they are easy.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is there reading makes it more.

However I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.

If they can prove that I am wrong by that time I will give it up to their wisdom but not after to any one's judgment till I see the end of another year for the Lord will begin with a new century and I will see what he will do before I will hearken to any man's judgment.

In my own personal life God plays a great role in the risk because I pray before I go into the operating room for every case and I ask him to give me wisdom to help me to know what to do - and not only for operating but for everything.

Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

I believe that anybody who gets married should go to a counselor for months before the wedding. I think that's going to save guys a lot of money and the ladies a lot of heartbreak.

I didn't finish my dress until about three days before my wedding - I had the flu and was stitching it from my bed. And the tulle came back from India all brown. We had to wash it for hours but that didn't dissuade me from wearing it.

My husband Jim converted to Judaism just before our wedding.

I only did karaoke once in my life. It was with Courtney Love and it was a total disaster. She pulled me on stage in front of 500 people at a wedding. I'd never done karaoke before.

A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes.

We're fighting an enemy that is far different than any we have got before. It's a nontraditional kind of war and I think we need to step back recalibrate how we go about protecting our borders and protecting our people and resetting our position in the world.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

It was my duty to shoot the enemy and I don't regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn't save: Marines soldiers buddies. I'm not naive and I don't romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.

From our perspective trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror if you will the war on terror that we're engaged in this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there.

It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts which was the way we did before 9/11 and then looking at 9/11 and saying 'This is not a criminal act ' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan kill 3 000 Americans blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.

Britain which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed is now being bombed and burned into democracy.