Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don’t do that, we really deserve the world we get.

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

People do not make wars; governments do.

The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Nobody wants to put the creditworthiness of the United States in jeopardy. Nobody wants to see the United States default. So we’ve got to seize this moment, and we have to seize it soon.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

You don’t hear no artists from Compton showing vulnerability.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

The people know their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them when they are invaded.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

I am such a political person.

Duty cannot exist without faith.

It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.

We came into a broken world. And we’re the cleanup crew.

When anyone has the power to destroy the whole human race in a matter of hours, it becomes a moral issue. The church must speak out.

I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

He incurs a fearful amount of guilt who in the least promotes the aim of the Evil One by trampling upon a tender conscience in a child.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

I don’t write policy for my government.

I don’t think the government should be in the trailer-park business. I don’t think they know how to run a trailer park.

Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.

That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed and crumbled away. Through that period, it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one.

The real danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like action is happening when in fact nothing is being done.

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is ‚to be prepared‘.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

People make a big fuss over you when you’re President. But I’m very serious about doing everything I can to make sure that it doesn’t go to my head.

In terms of my involvement in ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools – these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.

Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.

I don’t think there is a single social issue I haven’t spoken on.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Print some money and give it to us for the rain forests.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‚our‘ country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

I’m going to stay active as long as I can politically, and with the Carter Center primarily, and if I’m able mentally and physically, will continue to be quite active.

A Christian who does not pray for those who govern is not a good Christian.

Nothing is being done to stop the climate and ecological emergency from happening and to secure the future wellbeing for future generations.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

It’s empowering to know I am doing something, I am taking a stand, I am disrupting.

Being the only man in the household with my mom definitely helped me grow up fast.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.