Born on June 25th

"I go out with my band six months of the year and the rest of them with the Blues Brothers."

"I never thought I'd get a chance to sing with Wilson Pickett but we did."

"I was just about 6 weeks old when we moved to Detroit."

"The groups, though, were my inspiration way back then. I liked Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers."

"Oh yeah, I know Johnnie Bassett. We were part of that whole thing."

"People know me for up-tempo songs because of my hits."

"Everybody had their fans and they were fans of all of them."

"In the field of resilience & focus, we are not defined by the weight of our struggles, but by the strength we find when we rise."

"Like a lighthouse in the storm, your inner resolve must remain steady and bright. As a historical figure, this is the foundational truth I have observed."

"The hardest trials do not consume the gold; they refine the spirit and clear the path ahead."

"It takes a lot of people to make a winning team. Everybody's contribution is important."

"I think to the extent you die with money in the bank, you've miscalculated."

"A good team, like a good show, comes into being when the separate individuals working together create, in essence, another separate higher entity - the team - the show - which is better than any of those individuals can ever be on their own."

"It was Nate Monaster who encouraged me to be a writer."

"I was a guy who showed up for work and took the chance for finding out whether I could do it or not... I'd like to think I made my success not at the expense of anyone. Success was accidental."

"Television is what it's always been. The best of times and the worst of times at the same time."

"A lot of money eliminates a category of worry. If your car breaks down, you're still going to get through the day. But it doesn't make you a happy person if you weren't a happy person before."

"I don't sleep at night at all. Making movies is a marathon. I'm a good 100-yard-dash guy."

"I like to write scenes in the middle of the night. We could change every word of 'Family Ties' between Monday and Friday."

"You could put all of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's angry sermons on to one loop. You could put that loop up on the big screen at Radio City Music Hall and let it play there 24 hours a day, seven days a week and Barack Obama will still emerge as the next president of the United States."

"'Family Ties' was a very successful situation comedy. And, in almost every respect, it functioned on a day to day basis like a well-run, well conditioned basketball team. The show was performed live each week in front of a studio audience on Friday night."

"At the end of the seven years, 'Family Ties' voluntarily went off the air. And, we went off as the #1 show on TV that week. We cut down the nets on stage 24 and moved on with the rest of our lives. Always to carry with us the blessing of what we had gone through together."

"In the field of creativity & art, to create is to take a leap of faith into the quiet canvas of your own imagination."

"Art is the expression of our deepest questions, painted in colors that words cannot reach. As a scientist & scholar, this is the foundational truth I have observed."

"Every act of creation begins with a willing heart and the courage to make a mistake."

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."

"We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun."

"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

"Happiness can exist only in acceptance."

"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."