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

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

Right now, when we’re hearing so much disturbing and hateful rhetoric, it is so important to remember that our diversity has been – and will always be – our greatest source of strength and pride here in the United States.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

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.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

I don’t want enemies. I want friends, and I want them in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and loving whoever they want to.

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.

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

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

I’m trying to show everybody that I’m a girl, and I’m five foot four, and you can do anything you want, no matter your gender. It’s your world, too!

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

SEALs are human beings. We may all have the same haircuts, but we aren’t robots. Some SEALs are great people. Some are not great people. Some have done unspeakably terrible things. You’re dealing with different people, different dreams, different desires.

Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.

My parents taught me never to judge others based on whom they love, what color their skin is, or their religion.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

If a man reaches the heart of his own religion, he has reached the heart of the others, too. There is only one God, and there are many paths to him.

All religions must be tolerated… for every man must get to heaven in his own way.

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.

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

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

I’m going to try to unite all Americans.

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.

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.‘

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

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

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

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

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

My mother always used to say, ‚Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God‘ – that’s what she always said. The same God with different names.

We boil at different degrees.

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

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.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

I would not like to be the only woman on the court.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

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

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.