If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I’m always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

He who acts with a constant view to his own advantage will be much murmured against.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

When people are lame, they love to blame.

Watergate had become the center of the media’s universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.

Truth is a pathless land.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

I’ll be honest: I haven’t ruled politics out.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

Every thought you produce, anything you say, any action you do, it bears your signature.

It is better to be deceived by one’s friends than to deceive them.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore.

Politics have no relation to morals.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

I tell people, and it’s the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won’t make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won’t make you a servant of Christ.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

I don’t do research. I never have.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

A lie cannot live.

To me, a leader is someone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes. And so what I think is really important is sustainability.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

Unlike some politicians, I can admit to a mistake.

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.

Morality is contraband in war.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

I love great journalism. I appreciate it. I love a good, you know, I love good news stories. I love great books. I love great articles. I appreciate them so much, and they’ve been part of my education as a woman.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.