There’s people constantly asking you for something on set, so the multi-tasking of motherhood transfers very well to being a director. And I think you’re compassionate.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

Every relationship should eventually become a long-term relationship. Any director that I meet now isn’t just a director. He’s potentially a friend, and someone I can call to do a project that I want or that I have.

I had my first baby at twenty-one.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

I’ve never lived my life in the opinion of others. I believe I’m a good person. I believe I’m a good mom. But that’s for my kids to decide, not for the world.

I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.

We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.

My mother told me, ‚Son, nobody else but God knows.‘ And that’s what I’m about – reaching out to the people, crying with them, giving them hope. Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That’s what I do.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‚If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?‘ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‚If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?‘

While I believed deeply in my husband’s vision for this country… and I was certain he would make an extraordinary President… like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance. How would we keep them grounded under the glare of the national spotlight?

I always say I’m one of the toughest mama’s boys you’re ever gonna meet. And I say that to send a message to all the young thugs out there; that it’s nothing to be ashamed of to say you love your mother.

No mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology.

What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

I had a C-section, and I found it fascinating. I didn’t find it a sacrifice, and I didn’t find it a painful experience. I found it a fascinating miracle of what a body can do.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn’t anyone who doesn’t appreciate kindness and compassion.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, ‚Clint, you must remember, it’s only a movie.‘

What I remember as a child is that other kids didn’t care about suffering. I always did.

I will make action movies, I think, for a few more years, another five years.

I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

I always tried to do things by example, even though I was not a very good mother regarding routines and family life.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

Tears shed for self are tears of weakness, but tears shed for others are a sign of strength.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.

Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.

When people need love and understanding and support the most is when they deserve it the least.

I feel like if you’re a really good human being, you can try to find something beautiful in every single person, no matter what.

In America there’s no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

God is patient with us to become the God’s children he wants us to be but you really can see him weeping.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

Jesus never mistreated anyone just because they mistreated Him. He confronted them in a spirit of gentleness and then continued to love them.

I am for people. I can’t help it.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

He knows my limitations and where I’m a good wife and a good mom.

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

You hear about actors being late and all that sort of stuff, but you never find that with an actor who’s directed, because an actor who’s directed understands all the problems your production is going through.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

In my career as a director, there’s always been some point where you get halfway through it, or three-quarters, and you go: ‚What is this thing all about, and why am I telling the story? Does anybody really care about seeing this?‘ At that time you have to say: ‚OK, forget that and just go ahead.‘