We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I don’t know what ‚normal‘ means, anyway.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‚Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.‘

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

‚In Utero‘ was the first time I’d made an album that reached into the dark side. I remember the conflict and the uncertainty. I remember all those things when I hear ‚Pennyroyal Tea.‘

A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

I can simply tell you that since I was a kid, I didn’t like to look like anyone else.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

Prime Minister Maliki, released from American restraint, acted on his worst instincts, creating enormous distrust in Iraq’s Kurdish population and deeply embittering Sunnis in western Iraq’s Al Anbar, who lost any confidence in a Baghdad government they saw as adversarial.

I never wanted to be Marilyn – it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore.

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

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.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

It take many a year, mon, and maybe some bloodshed must be, but righteousness someday prevail.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

Laws are silent in time of war.

Politics is the womb in which war develops.

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.

I hate being called an ‚icon.‘ I just don’t like it. That’s all there is to it.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.

It’s very unnatural to be someone for so many people. But of course it’s very nice.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender. Only through hardship, sacrifice and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

I just dress like… I’m an old black man. Sorry! Like I’m an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it’s still the ’50s.

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I’m someone else.

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

I read to my kid, but I can’t stand reading.

The many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – meaning primarily the United States – come down to two fundamental issues: ‚What are the accepted and applicable ‚rules of world order,‘ and how do these apply in the case of Kosovo?‘

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

No one doubts that innocent men, women and children have been the victims of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. And there’s no doubt who is responsible for this heinous use of chemical weapons in Syria: the Syrian regime.

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.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

I’m not who people expect me to be. I’m not Henry Kissinger.