Michael Shammas

Pour your entire self into whatever you’re painting or writing or filming, and don’t give up. In Holiday’s words, “Don’t just make it. Make it happen.”

To transcend meaninglessness, we must lean into it and acknowledge it. For though our rolling of the stones of human experience up the various hills of life may come to nothing, “the struggle itself … is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

We are loud with our voices, yet we are silent in the only way that matters. You can’t stop genocide with words and drone strikes.

“Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”

As you go through law school, don’t lose these desires so that they are replaced with only one: The desire to be an excellent attorney. You are a human, not a machine.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote, if we truly desire democracy we must “educate and inform the whole mass of the people,” for “they are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

I don’t have 1,260 friends in real life; I interact with a core group of 10 to 15 people.

One does not have to become despondent when bad things happen; to a degree, one can choose to remain happy.

We will be raising Americans who possess the capacity to respond to problems with inquisitive rather than angry minds

In the Bible, Jesus is a revolutionary figure, a rebel who questions conventional morality and societal traditions and who stresses mercy over justice.