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

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

A family shares hardships and a connected history.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

The man who has done his level best… is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

All empires come to an end, and the American one is no exception.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

I never wanted to stay in one genre; I never wanted to be pigeon-holed or defined as the actor who only worked in one genre. I want to be able to work in all different genres. For me it’s fun, and that’s how I grow as an actor.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

Without Cambodia, I may never have become a mother. Part of my heart is and will always be in this country. And part of this country is always with me: Maddox.

I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating – is this the exact right mix? I think that’s – to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

Things do not always happen the way I would like them to happen, and I had better get used to that.

It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.

You might be tough, but you can only be so tough for so long, you know what I mean? The brain can only take so much damage. The body can only take so much damage.

We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm.

If you don’t stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.

I don’t even call them fans. I don’t like that. They’re literally just a part of my life; they’re a part of my family. I don’t think of them as on a lower level than me. I don’t think I’m anything but equal to all of them. So yeah, they’re basically all of my siblings.

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

I come from – I came from Wales, and it’s a strong, butch society. We were in the war and all that. People didn’t waste time feeling sorry for themselves. You had to get on with it. So my credo is get on with it. I don’t waste time being soft. I’m not cold, but I don’t like being, wasting my time with – life’s too short.

I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

I’m not going to stop having problems.

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

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

More businesses should be following Apple’s stance in encouraging more investment in sustainability.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

I’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change. But it doesn’t mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women. If you think that, you’ve forgotten high school.

The reward of suffering is experience.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

The intention and outcome of vulnerability is trust, intimacy and connection. The outcome of oversharing is distrust, disconnection – and usually a little judgment.

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

We just seem to have lost all our morals and principles and values these days.