"I was so thankful that my parents trusted me enough and had enough faith in my abilities to let me follow my passion and try to do something great, even if I might fail."

"The critics barged in to harp on every decision we made. . .Sadly, I began to doubt myself. Maybe I was too young. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough sailor."

"After the week of stormy weather, she set sail under sunny skies, on a glassy sea with a big swell running."

"On October 19, 2009, my sixteenth birthday, Wild Eyes officially became mine! Now it was really happening."

"Being at sea is like watching the whole world in high-definition."

"But none of that kept me from picturing what a tsunami might look like if it did rise up and roar toward my little boat like some watery blue version of the Great Wall of China."

"One day that same year, I told my dad that someday, I would sail around the world alone."

"Fewer people have successfully solo-circumnavigated the globe than have journeyed into space."

"All the ingenuity, all the high-tech gear, all the jury-rigging—sometimes the sea would rip it all away until there was only you, the Creator, and His mercy."

"I wanted to break the record, of course, and become the youngest person to sail around the world solo and unassisted."

"I saw the loose tiller jolt hard to the side as the boat began to spin."

"I will never forget the feeling of walking into my home, a place that while drifting helpless in the middle of the Indian Ocean I wondered if I would ever see again."

"I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth."

"I will definitely attempt to sail around the world again. In fact, I can’t wait for the chance to try again."

"I am twelve thousand miles wiser, twelve thousand miles more resilient, and I have twelve thousand miles more faith in God."

"He's not just the most powerful man in labor," Robert Kennedy had said in the wake of Hoffa's announcement; "he's the most powerful man in the country, next to the President."

"No more than one third of his working time, indeed, was spent in his office."

"More apparent to Teamster members than any moral lapses were the tangible gains that had been steadily realized under Hoffa since his advent to power."

"From 1955 until 1965 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as Elvis Presley. From 1965 until 1975 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as the Beatles."

"There are simply no public figures today who so challenge the elite business and government establishment and so champion the working class as Jimmy Hoffa did almost daily and with arrogance."

"At least one time in adulthood, on the other hand, Hoffa claimed just seven school grades."

"Hell, I'm not saying I'm an angel, but when it came to dirty tricks I couldn't hold a candle to the Irish Mafia."

"But to hear Kennedy when he was grandstanding in front of the McClellan Committee you might have thought I was making as much out of the pension fund as the Kennedys made out of selling whiskey."

"Our rooms were bugged, our phones were tapped, and our lawyer's rooms were broken into and their files stolen. We finally had to hire armed guards with pistols to be able to maintain our records. It was hard to believe we weren't in Russia."

"It has to be considered damned unusual that no other union was ever investigated."

"Sure, we loaned money to build hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. So what? Las Vegas borrowers were good customers."

"When you go to prison they forget it's your Constitution, too."

"We never had any silk sheets in our family..."

"I let him strain for a couple of seconds. Then like taking candy from a baby, I flipped his arm over and cracked his knuckles on the top of the table. It was strictly no contest and he knew it. But he had to try again. Same results."

"A slab of bread "buttered" with lard and, if you were lucky, seasoned with salt and pepper, was a luxury."

"Mob guys had muscle, and where in hell do you think employers got the tough guys when they wanted to break a strike?"

"Power leads to more power, no matter what your racket, and not only were they rich and influential but they were smart as hell, too."

"I've said consistently that no employer ever really accepts a union. They tolerate the unions. The very minute they can get a pool of unemployment they'll challenge the unions and try to get back what they call managements prerogatives, meaning hire, fire, pay what you want."

"In the ten years I was president of the Teamsters, I had raised the membership from eight hundred thousand to more than 2 million and made it the largest single labor union the world."

"When you run an organization like the Teamsters one man has to be the boss and run things."

"I do to others what they do to me, only worse."

"They all know I'm back, very much back, and that I will be the general president again come hell or high water."

"You almost had to live through it to really know the gut ripping misery of the depression during the early thirties which led to labor's bloodiest and most violent days."

"Nobody in this country respects what's weak. You believe me! If you see a beggar on a corner, with his hat in his hand, nobody respects him. Dress the same man up, give him an air of dignity, and he can command respect. The same thing applies to this union."

"But because we are financially solid, because we do have an organization that is equipped to handle any situation that comes in front of us, we are successful in getting from the employers what our members want and need without strikes."

"I'll be back."

"I've always been with the one who rebels against false values. My heroes now are Ralph Nader and Daniel Ellsberg."

"Chelsea Manning is again acting heroically in the name of press freedom, and it’s a travesty that she has been sent back to jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury. An investigation into WikiLeaks for publishing is a grave threat to all journalists’ rights, and Chelsea is doing us all a service for fighting it. She has already been tortured, spent years in jail, and has suffered more than enough. She should be released immediately."

"I am a writer today because I learned to love reading as a child — and mostly on account of the Oz books."

"EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."

"The question really arises is it a republic if you can keep it, question have we kept it? And the answer is no! No we have not kept it. Since 2001 we have in effect an elected monarchy. And ah, meaning a country which Nixon's view 'when a president does it, it is legal'. The president says it's not illegal. That is the attitude long after Nixon of John Yoo, who was the advisor to George W. Bush, of David Addington, Bush Cheney's legal advisor. Essentially there are no limits on presidential power except those which he chooses to put on himself. Obama following on, has in effect decriminalized torture which is as illegal and criminal as anything can be under international law and domestic law, a number of domestic laws and international laws, which we have ratified to investigate, and follow-up if there is any credible charge. Obama has chosen not to investigate or indict any higher up for that process of torture."

"I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. I let myself into my tiny little studio, all alone. I shut the door behind me. Another early bedtime in Rome. Another long night's sleep ahead of me, with nobody and nothing in my bed except a pile of Italian phrase books and dictionaries. I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone. Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees, and press my forehead against the floor. There I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks. First in English. Then in Italian. And then — just to get the point across — in Sanskrit. And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment where this entire story began — a moment that also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying."

"We weren't on the wrong side. We are the wrong side."

"The American public was lied to [about the Vietnam War] month by month by each of these five administrations [Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon]. It's a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to. It's no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public."

"That was a documentary!"