To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

You’re looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

To kids, I’ve always been more than just some big tough black guy. I train to be tough – I box and do karate – but underneath all that toughness is a tender man.

I’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.

It’s rare for anyone to value the opinions of a teenage girl.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims, even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

That’s what I do this for, to secure my family’s future. I don’t care about anything else. I’m able to spoil people, and that’s the best thing.

Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are gone but a declaration of our hopes for the future, and for the years I may, by God’s Grace and Mercy, be given to reign and serve you as your Queen.

Getting recognized is insane. It just blows my mind. Like, someone who you don’t know at all can just be like, ‚Oh my God – are you Billie?‘

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

Sometimes a nickname is used instead of the real name. But a nickname may offend either the one named or the parents who gave the name.

After two years at UCLA, I decided to leave. I was convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a job.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

The mainstream is always under attack.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

We can have no ’50-50′ allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

I want everybody to understand that I am an American Negro first before I am a member of any political party.

Let it be our delight to find our society in the circle of which Jesus is the center, and let us make those our friends who are the friends of Jesus.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

My mother made me truly appreciate women.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

We live in a bewildering world.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

In cricket, my superhero is Sachin Tendulkar. He has always been my hero and will continue to remain so. Apart from him and outside cricket, my mother has remained my inspiration. Whatever difficult time I had faced, she was always there for me. She has given me all the strength. She maintained her composure and supported me in tough times.

As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis‘ future.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.