You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

My purpose is to help people look at themselves and begin to shift their concepts. Remember, we are not our country, our race, or religion. We are eternal spirits. Seeing ourselves as spiritual beings without label is a way to transform the world and reach a sacred place for all of humanity.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

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

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

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

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t really speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

I’m afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

Children are all foreigners.

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

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

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.

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

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

The little man is still a man.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

We’re so trendy we can’t even escape ourselves.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

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.‘

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.