We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that changed their abortion laws before Roe are not going to change back. So we have a policy that only affects poor women, and it can never be otherwise.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand.

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.

I never thought I’d have children; I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person. Having come from a broken home – you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.

Love is a serious mental disease.

When your higher self is present, it always promotes peace.

You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of ‚then‘ and ‚maybe,‘ but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience.

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.

That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

That’s what I do this for, to secure my family’s future. I don’t care about anything else. I’m able to spoil people, and that’s the best thing.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.

Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.

My future is righteousness.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it, and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.

I love performing, you know, because, like I say, I’m a ham for this stuff.

Where love is, there God is also.

A calling is you feel – you look out and see the need – maybe it’s the need for the poor, to help poor people. Maybe it’s the need to get involved in the race problem, as Martin Luther King was – felt called.

Black people in America, people from the struggle, immigrants, it’s no generational wealth that we are attached to, so we are tasked to create – in one generation – closing the gap. That’s why we so Doomsday about getting to the check: ‚cause it’s life or death for real.

Most poor people live in the poorest countries.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

As I got older, I guess I became more mellow and more forgiving and more loving.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

The services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, but in peace are only fit for fools.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

If I have a platform and a voice, I should use it for my people.

In a democracy, the well-being, individuality and happiness of every citizen is important for the overall prosperity, peace and happiness of the nation.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England – you couldn’t have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things.

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.