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The path to success is to take massive, determined action.
The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.
We got to do a few things with President Clinton. To be invited to Washington again to play with Ashanti and all those other cool people there in front of President Bush and the rest of the world feels awesome. I’m really looking forward to going.
The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn’t always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn’t yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
There’s such big pressure on people who are incredibly famous, on those who have people sitting outside their front door and taking photos every time they move.
Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots in the ground.
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
The delta blues is a low-down, dirty shame blues. It’s a sad, big wide sound, something to make you think about people who are dead or the women who left you.
I think movies glamorize violence, in the sense that they make it in a way that it’s either cool or funny.
The only other time I’ve been away from home was when I went to college. And that was just an hour away, so I could always go home if I needed to.
When you are young your imagination is so clear.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
You’ve got to kick fear to the side, because the payoff is huge.
No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women… When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.
I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There’s no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.
We start ‘The Butler’ in June and that’s incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with the amazing Forest Whitaker again. It’s a phenomenal script and a great, great role – I play his son. Oprah Winfrey is his wife and my mother. My character is a radical civil rights activist.
There was a time I was very much blaming the way I felt on L.A, that it was a vacuum of creativity, of humor or anything organic, and I was really angry at the place. But then today I feel completely different – I love L.A.!
He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.
Actually I think Art lies in both directions – the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
I was able to support myself by acting alone about six years ago. Until then, I was just scraping by.
I’m very, very concerned about the Bush presidency. I’m worried about the kinds of cuts in domestic programs that mean something to a lot of people, including members of my family, who depend on certain things from the government.
It’s always such a joy that you wake up in the morning and there’s work to do.
I’m a mom, a full-time mom when I’m not taping. I do the carpool thing, and bake the cookies, and do the homework.
The middle class is so funny, it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.
I feel so thankful that I’m able to be a part of something that I love to wake up and run to work every day.
Men are going to go out on the road and they’re going to find other women. So if you really want to save yourself a whole lot of heartache, do not fall in love with somebody in a band. Just don’t.
Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler’s short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.
Tina Turner is someone that I admire, because she made her strength feminine and sexy.
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.
The Iranian regime suppresses its own people as well as others in the region. It prevents peace by sponsoring terror globally. With the ultimate weapon that it is deceptively developing, the regime aims to gain hegemony over the entire Middle East and hold the world’s economy hostage.
I had spindly little ankles, and growing up in Canada, I couldn’t skate. I was no good at any sports so was very much a pariah through those adolescent years.
The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street, the battlers, by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them, they are treating them with contempt. It’s our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.
Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.
You know, in 1975 I couldn’t get a job in New York City because I was American. The kitchens were predominantly run by French, Swiss, German, and basically I got laughed at. I had education, I had experience, but got laughed at because I was American.
But you can’t focus on things that matter if all you’ve been is asleep for forty years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep. You know.
I can tell you for sure: people who are at their peak right now will not sustain that. You can’t. It’s against the law of nature.
Same-sex marriage is not the future.
The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.
I try to give the media as many confusing images as I can to retain my freedom. What’s real is for my children and the people I live with.
I’ve been interested in dreams since I as a kid and I’ve wanted to do a film about them for a long time.
Politics aside, it will be hard for any new liberal radio network to outdo the professionalism of NPR.
I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
One fails forward toward success.
We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.
Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.