Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

I’ve come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it’s a subject below their social standing.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.

People don’t want drama 365 days a year. I’m a sense of relief; it’s my job to take your mind off what’s bad for that brief second you’re in the room with me, regardless of shape, race, colour or anything. It brings people together, and it makes me feel good about what I’m doing.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I’m someone else.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

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.

Liverpool people are famous for liking clothes and fashion; they are very social and lively people, and we know that they like clothes.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

I’m going to try to unite all Americans.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I have a big gay and lesbian following and they’ve been very loyal and kind to me.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Honestly, I like everything, boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny.

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.

In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand.

I can simply tell you that since I was a kid, I didn’t like to look like anyone else.

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

When I ask OGs why there’s so much division in the streets, nobody never really knows. But you know one thing that everybody always mention? A woman.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

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

There are some teams and logos you see, no matter where you are in the world, and you know exactly who they are and what they mean.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.

Me don’t dip on nobody’s side. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side, not the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country – I know, because I am one of them.

It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

People like to talk about war.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

No, I’m not a French designer either. I’m from nowhere. I’m a European, old European is all I am.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.