As much as I’m a black person from America, I’m a black person from Africa, too.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

I hate the idea of genres.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.

Children are all foreigners.

The day will come – and it is not far off – when the legacy of Lincoln will finally be fulfilled at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when a black man or woman will sit in the Oval Office. When that day comes, the most remarkable thing about it will be how naturally it occurs.

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

The immigration issue is, I recognize, one that generates a lot of passion, but it does not make sense for us to want to push talent out.

Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

Part of the core information that I’ve been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don’t play racial, ethnic, and gender identity games. The Left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let’s say, and the Right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they’re equally dangerous.

My mother always used to say, ‚Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God‘ – that’s what she always said. The same God with different names.

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.

Women are the engine driving the growth in California’s economy. Women make California’s economy unique.

I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American.

My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

To like an individual because he’s black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn’t white.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

I love making new friends and I respect people for a lot of different reasons.

I’d love to do a musical. I’ve been known to have a good step or two. I’m half Samoan, you know, and part of our culture is singing and dancing daily.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.

I have some good friends of my own who happen to be gay, and when it comes to gay, straight, or whatever, I’m for anything life-affirmative. I’m for gay power, straight power, male power, female power; everybody should feel empowered without oppressing anyone who’s different.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

Our diversity is our strength. What a dull and pointless life it would be if everyone was the same.

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.

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

I’m asking myself, ‚What do my girls, what do all our children deserve in their president? What kind of a president do we want for them?‘ Well, to start with, I think we want someone who is a unifying force in this country: someone who sees our differences not as a threat, but as a blessing.

We’re African-American and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don’t share that belief.

If a man reaches the heart of his own religion, he has reached the heart of the others, too. There is only one God, and there are many paths to him.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

God tells us not to judge one another, no matter what anyone’s sexual preferences are or if they’re black, brown or purple.

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

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.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

My parents taught me never to judge others based on whom they love, what color their skin is, or their religion.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

I love diversity.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

My mother, my grandmother, my uncles would play Ethiopian artists like Aster Aweke and Mulatu Astatke all the time in the house.

I want to support other women because of the opportunities I’ve had – and I’ve had a lot of opportunities. What I try as a female director is to do the best job I can and, in the meantime, bring attention to as many other female directors and writers as I can.

All of these young people have some kind of potential in them. And if we don’t invest in them as a nation, regardless of where they come from or what color they are, if we don’t invest in them, we lose.

Our country does not believe in the concept of your God and my God. We believe that all gods are one. We have different ways of accepting Him. All ways lead to Him.