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.

Jack was out kissing babies while I was out passing bills. Someone had to tend the store.

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.

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

My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father’s head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

God’s dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.

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.

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

We have an obligation to help people that cannot help themselves. The mentally retarded, the physically retarded, et cetera.

When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

When a father puts in long hours at work, he’s praised for being dedicated and ambitious. But when a mother stays late at the office, she’s sometimes accused of being selfish, neglecting her kids.

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

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

It’s that wonderful old-fashioned idea that others come first and you come second. This was the whole ethic by which I was brought up. Others matter more than you do, so ‚don’t fuss, dear; get on with it.‘

Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

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

A tear dries quickly when it is shed for troubles of others.

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

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

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

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

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.‘

Whether a person is straight or gay, Republican, Democrat, good person, not a good person, they’re all welcome, because to me, church is a place you’re supposed to get healed and whole and loved.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

I love our daughters more than anything in the world – more than life itself. And while that may not be the first thing that some folks want to hear from an Ivy-league-educated lawyer, it is truly who I am. So for me, being Mom-in-Chief is, and always will be, job number one.

I had my first baby at twenty-one.

Actually, I didn’t start sweating until I had children.

If you wished to be loved, love.

If you are not being bullied all I would say – cause I like to talk about the other side of it as well – is you know, be someone that nurtures, and if there’s someone in your class that maybe doesn’t have a lot of friends, be the person that sits with them in the cafeteria sometimes; be the bigger person.

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.

The happiest people I know as a nation are the Burmese; their brightness and cheeriness are proverbial. Kindness to animals is one of their greatest ‚weaknesses‘; no Burmese will kill an animal, even if it is to put it out of pain.

It’s hard work making movies. It’s like being a doctor: you work long hours, very hard hours, and it’s emotional, tense work. If you don’t really love it, then it ain’t worth it.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.

After momma gave birth to 12 of us kids, we put her up on a pedestal. It was mostly to keep Daddy away from her.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, ‚If you don’t know how to make the right decision, you’re not a director.‘

It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I’d ever have any interest in filmmaking.

A good thing to remember is somebody’s got it a lot worse than we do.

I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, and love the offender, yet detest the offence?

Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

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.

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

Let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living beings.

It’s amazing if you just listen to people. They tell you all the time things that you can do for them, without even realizing what they’re doing. I’ve learned to take notice of those things and if it’s something that I feel God wants me to do, then I try to do that to add joy to their life.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.