When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

If people lose faith in their government, the result is the same whether or not the loss of confidence is justified.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

America has absorbed people from around the world, and there is an Indian in every part of the world. This characterizes both the societies. Indians and Americans have co-existed in their natural temperament.

The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

Building capacity dissolves differences. It irons out inequalities.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‚healthy‘ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations‘ economic health.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

The magic of America is that we’re a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It’s one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It’s a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

Oh yes, there’s lots of great food in America. But the fast food is about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth, convenience, and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

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

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

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.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You’re not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

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

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

I think the tiniest little thing can change the course of your day, which can change the course of your year, which can change who you are.

The time to worrying about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many ‚bads‘ – bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even ‚bad‘ white males. Only, when you write about ‚bad‘ white males, they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are ‚good‘ blacks, ‚good‘ homosexuals and ‚good‘ women?

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

I can’t help the way you was born if you was gay.

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

I don’t really have a gimmick or a ‚thing.‘ I’m one of the few artists who gets to be himself every day.

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.