The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city’s biggest strength, and it is Toronto’s unique strength.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

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.

Here in America, we don’t let our differences tear us apart. Not here. Because we know that our greatness comes from when we appreciate each other’s strengths, when we learn from each other, when we lean on each other, because in this country, it’s never been each person for themselves. No, we’re all in this together. We always have been.

Let me state the obvious. Illegal immigration is illegal, duh.

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don’t think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.

I believe in a passion for inclusion.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

I have learned to interface – what I think would be the contemporary term – with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I’ve learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.

When I think of myself, I think of Toronto. My music would never sound the way it does if it weren’t for Toronto.

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

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights, so it looks like I’m the only one moving.

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

We don’t want two-tier people in America. Those who are legal but not citizens, and citizens.

I try to do something the audience might not have seen before. Like if I’m gonna kiss a girl I wanna kiss her like a girl has never been kissed. Like maybe I would kick her legs out from under her and catch her right before she hits the ground and then kiss her.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

My mother came from India to go to the University of California, Berkeley.

Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the ‚human stratum‘ may not be homogeneous.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of 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.

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.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

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

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.

I can’t help the way you was born if you was gay.

From when I was born to when I was 21, I never left Toronto. That’s why I’m such a city cat.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You’re not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

All of these young people have some kind of potential in them. And if we don’t invest in them as a nation, regardless of where they come from or what color they are, if we don’t invest in them, we lose.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

Sometimes, people can be extraordinarily judgmental and closed-minded to anyone different or special, which is why it’s so hard for young people in this day and age to be comfortable enough in their own skin to not listen to the people picking on them.

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?

Racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, or hatred of anyone with different beliefs has no place in the human mind or heart.

I think, in politics, half the people are gonna like you, and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say… It’s like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They’re all opinions.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

We boil at different degrees.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

Oh yes, there’s lots of great food in America. But the fast food is about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth, convenience, and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.

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

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

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.