The US government says you shouldn’t be forced to use special characters in your passwords

Using a longer password with only alphanumeric (for example, a phrase like "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink"), is a stronger password than many of the ones using the standard 14 character, alphanumeric, special symbol ones. Add a few numbers in place of some letters and you'll have an easy to remember (although a little long to type) password. The key is to keep it un-guessable and length matters more than number of possible characters (that is unless you want to have a shorter password, which then makes sense to have more character sets). No password is un-crackable, given enough time, and the act of getting the password hash presents a larger problem. In other words, if I capture the Windows SAM file or Linux/Unix Shadow file, I've pretty much got control of the respective system. Cracking the passwords only helps propagate the access if given enough time.

Personally, I think of a phrase I like/remember, and then I take the 1st character from each word. For some I use both numbers and/or special symbols to obfuscate and increase complexity. For example, using the phrase I used above: Yc1@htH20,bycMid (i.e. You can 1ead @ horse to H20, but you can't Make it drink). And no, this is not a password I use for any of my accounts.

I keep my passwords simple, so that I won't forget them. And their still within specs.