The immigration issue is, I recognize, one that generates a lot of passion, but it does not make sense for us to want to push talent out.

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

I always thought about working in England because of the kind of football, the intensity of football. Liverpool was first choice.

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

I want people to follow their dreams, yes… but I’m not interested in telling young black kids how to be rappers… I want to show them that there’s so many other paths you can take, besides a rapper or basketball player.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Americans move more than 10 times over the course of a lifetime.

Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

The important thing is to be in love with something.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I disagree with any policy that would turn America’s back on people who are fleeing harm. I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for.

God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

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.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

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.

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

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

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

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

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

The intensity of the football and how the people live football in Liverpool – it is not a usual.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

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.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

To do anything to a high level, it has to be total obsession.

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

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

The magic of America is that we’re a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.

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.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Let’s face it. Umpiring is not an easy or happy way to make a living. In the abuse they suffer, and the pay they get for it, you see an imbalance that can only be explained by their need to stay close to a game they can’t resist.