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.

I don’t think I ever thought of myself as Superman. But there were people who thought of me that way, and maybe I believed them a little.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

Whoever won’t fight when the President calls him, deserves to be kicked back in his hole and kept there.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

The Iraqis have become invested in their nationhood.

Lady Gaga is my name. If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I wear the national dress because it is the most natural and the most becoming for an Indian.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I’m an Irish man.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

In this country, it doesn’t make any difference where you were born. It doesn’t make any difference who your parents were. It doesn’t make any difference if, like me, you couldn’t even speak English until you were in your twenties.

I don’t want to be called a point guard, but I can’t stop it.

There are a lot of people who don’t know me and what I am all about.

My son’s full real name is Duncan Zowie Haywood. As a toddler, he was called by his second name Zowie. But it was such an identifiable name during the Seventies that if I called him loudly in public places, everyone would turn to stare, so I started calling him Joey to take the pressure off.

The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.

Me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

Why am I a star? It can’t be because of looks.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

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.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, ‚black feminist‘ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just… womanish.

I have always reckoned the dignity of the republic of first importance and preferable to life.

American stuntmen are smart – they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance… But in Hong Kong, we don’t know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you’ve got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt.

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation – not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

The American claim that the bombing of North Vietnam was directed against military targets does not withstand direct investigation.

This man is frank and earnest with women. In Fresno, he’s Frank and in Chicago he’s Ernest.

One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

I do believe in the energy and the productivity of the American business world.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

Because I’m small, I’ve been called things from ‚Happy Feet‘ to ‚Little Face.‘

True patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

You want to know whether we’re better off? I’ve got a little bumper sticker for you: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive! Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!

I don’t know who I would have been if I never watched MotoGP.

There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.