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

The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city’s biggest strength, and it is Toronto’s unique strength.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

It’s very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

I didn’t know any gay people in my childhood.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

I’m going to try to unite all Americans.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

There are many levels of Christianity. There are many notions about God. To believe that God is a person is just one of the notions of God that you can find in Christianity. So, we should not say that there is one Christianity. There are many Christianities.

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

The diversity of India, of our civilization, is actually a thing of beauty, which is something we are extremely proud of.

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.

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It’s either ‚rawk‘ or it’s not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Being beautiful is not so fun when you’re in a business with all men.

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.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

I remember being in Japan when Destiny’s Child put out ‚Independent Women,‘ and women there were saying how proud they were to have their own jobs, their own independent thinking, their own goals. It made me feel so good, and I realized that one of my responsibilities was to inspire women in a deeper way.

I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there’s a good English phrase for it – cold war.

We believe that every single child has boundless promise, no matter who they are, where they come from, or how much money their parents have. We’ve got to remember that. We believe that each of these young people is a vital part of the great American story.

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.

Everything is possible, from angels to demons to economists and politicians.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‚It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.‘ This was a very healthy attitude.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

Men and women aren’t the same. And they won’t be the same. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be treated fairly.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

In this country, it doesn’t make any difference where you were born. It doesn’t make any difference who your parents were. It doesn’t make any difference if, like me, you couldn’t even speak English until you were in your twenties.

We don’t need to share the same opinions as others, but we need to be respectful.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the ‚human stratum‘ may not be homogeneous.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

You have your ideology and I have mine.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.

I want people to follow their dreams, yes… but I’m not interested in telling young black kids how to be rappers… I want to show them that there’s so many other paths you can take, besides a rapper or basketball player.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we’re probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

Both times I was in India, I could not get people to listen to each other. I had to literally tell people to listen to each other and tell them that they can’t get creative and find alternate solutions if they don’t listen to each other. There’s a lot of arguing and justifying.

Everyone is different. Everyone has different teams they’ve played on, coaches they’ve played for.

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

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

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

Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana are not racists.

I’m married to an Italian woman, and I used to love cooking Italian at home, because it’s one-pot cooking. But my wife does not approve of my Italian cooking.