If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there’s a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

I’ve been blessed with talents to play this game and been put on a stage to impact a lot of people. I don’t want to take that for granted.

When someone does a small task beautifully, their whole environment is affected by it.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

No matter how bad any situation, cynicism has no positive impact. Watching the news, you might notice that cynicism and victimhood often seem to go hand-in-hand, but not for veterans.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what’s really happened.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

I’m very active on social media and see the huge impact it has on engaging with fans and being able to have a voice.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

‚Border‘ was the first movie that I watched on the big screen. It always takes me back to my childhood.

I believe that one person can make a difference.

Not bragging by any means, but I could have done a lot of other stuff as far as working in films go and working in television… I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.

The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.

I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That’s still what I am doing. The end.

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

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.

I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.

If you go to a bad movie, it’s two hours. If you’re in a bad movie, it’s two years.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of an individual. If the people remember me as a good teacher, that will be the biggest honour for me.

We can all be successful and make money, but when we die, that ends. But when you are significant is when you help other people be successful. That lasts many a lifetime.

As an entrepreneur, I have been known for taking risks throughout my career, but leaving the European Union is not one of the risks I would want the U.K. to take – not as an investor, not as a father, and not as a grandfather. I am deeply concerned about the impact of leaving.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

I have a love interest in every one of my films: a gun.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

The moral disapprobation of society has an impact on behavior in societies.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

The thing that’s made me open my eyes to what was happening to the environment and climate was films and documentaries.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force.

None of the films I’ve done was designed for a mass audience, except for ‚Indiana Jones.‘ Nobody in their right mind thought ‚American Graffiti‘ or ‚Star Wars‘ would work.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It’s inevitable.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

That’s when it becomes a business. When you’ve been public a long time, when it’s a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.

Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.

I loved the material when I first read it, and the experience of making the film was a great one. So when we came around to complete the trilogy, I just signed on board without even reading the scripts because the experience of the first film was so good.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

Fame hit me like a ton of bricks.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.