If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

I don’t know if it’s changing already with ‚Joanne,‘ but my intention is to bring people together that don’t know each other and that would maybe feel awkward, but somehow be brought together by the music. That’s what I wanted to do. Because that is pure and authentic to my family history and what I stand for.

When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like ‚Bird,‘ I use 90% black people.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

If you’re white and you’re wrong, then you’re wrong; if you’re black and you’re wrong, you’re wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green – God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.

Our inquiring friends and neighbors not of our faith can also catch the wave. We encourage them to keep all that is good and true in their lives. And we invite them to receive more, especially the glorious truth that through God’s eternal plan, families can be together forever.

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.

Seek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth. You must give some time to your fellow man. For remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

We’re a diverse society, and I think the TV is doing a great job in showing that we’re all human beings, that we can all get along, that we can all be together, and I think that’s a marvelous thing.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.

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

Women are the engine driving the growth in California’s economy. Women make California’s economy unique.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom – and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

Traditions are a common part of our lives. They can be good, and not all traditions are wrong, but sometimes they can take the joy out of life.

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.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

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

There are disasters that happen – Hurricane Harvey came up, and you had people self-organizing through the community and getting in boats and driving around rescuing people coordinated ad hoc through this network. That’s not a media function.

I don’t go down the road of condemning.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

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

In most communities it is illegal to cry ‚fire‘ in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

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.

In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

I’m going to try to unite all Americans.

American stuntmen are smart – they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance… But in Hong Kong, we don’t know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you’ve got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I’ve met.

In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

A real Christian is a person who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

You can think of the entire Internet as a place where ideas embodied in cyberspace are having a war, and it’s not much different than the war of gods in heaven, which has been taking place since there’s been human beings.

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.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

There’s pros and cons of a big church. Cons is I don’t get to know everybody, I don’t get to go to their ballgame, I don’t get to marry everybody, but the pros are you get all this community, 800 ushers come in to serve, getting there at 7 in the morning on their day off and coming in on Saturday to make all those wafers.

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

Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

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.