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

I believe in universal health care. And I am not afraid to say so.

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.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri – where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.

For way too long the politicians and people in power have got away with not doing anything at all to fight the climate crisis and ecological crisis.

I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.

When Caroline Kennedy managed to say ‚you know‘ more than 200 times in an interview with the New York ‚Daily News,‘ and on 130 occasions while talking to ‚The New York Times‘ during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class.

I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.

When I was younger and did a stand-up gig, it would take me two weeks to recover. Sometimes I’d get so panicked that I would stutter.

People are unaware of what is going on. When I talk to people, they know the basics, they know the planet is warming because of greenhouse gases… but they don’t know the actual consequence of that.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

For 25 years countless people have come to the U.N. climate conferences begging our world leaders to stop emissions and clearly that has not worked as emissions are continuing to rise. So I will not beg the world leaders to care for our future. I will instead let them know change is coming whether they like it or not.

He was so depressed, he tried to commit suicide by inhaling next to an Armenian.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

The best thing about my protest has been to see how more and more people have been coming and getting involved.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

By stopping flying, you don’t only reduce your own carbon footprint but also that sends a signal to other people around you that the climate crisis is a real thing and that helps push a political movement.

Great is our admiration of the orator who speaks with fluency and discretion.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

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.

Our present moment is a mystery that we are part of. Here and now is where all the wonder of life lies hidden. And make no mistake about it, to strive to live completely in the present is to strive for what already is the case.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

I’ve been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.

Anti-Semitism is real in this country.

The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.

Homophobia is real in this country.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re going to have to take what they get.

In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.

We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

Wherever I go meeting the public… spreading a message of human values, spreading a message of harmony, is the most important thing.

Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience.

When I ask OGs why there’s so much division in the streets, nobody never really knows. But you know one thing that everybody always mention? A woman.

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.

I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I’m here.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known – the plantations – because they attempted to exercise their ‚democratic‘ right to vote.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

The ‚Third World‘ is a term I don’t like very much because we’re all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime. I’ve came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‚I’m a representative.‘

The proper study of mankind is woman.