All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

I’m not focused on the gay and lesbian movement.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t really speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

You gotta understand: I believe a woman should praise the man, the king. If you holding it down for your woman, I feel like the woman should praise. And the man should praise the queen.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.

I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

We don’t want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful – not only to that member of the community but the entire community.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? We shouldn’t marginalise people for this. They must be integrated into society.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like ‚Bird,‘ I use 90% black people.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated on the job.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

If we do not lift up women and families, everyone will fall short.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.