But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.

It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.

Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.

Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.

The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.

The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.

The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres.

The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.

We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth.

Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans.

America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.

Look to yourself

Faith is the confidence, the assurance, the enforcing truth, the knowing.

I'm not trying to achieve perfection. I don't like this forced control people have over work.

For lack of a better word, acting is therapeutic. You really are breaking down barriers, exorcising demons and finding more out about yourself.

There will always be people for whom hate is easier when it’s not backed up by anything but fear.

When I said I no longer wanted to be a painter, that I wanted to be an actor, the first thing I did was get a stinking job in an insurance building.

Stem cell research can revolutionize medicine, more than anything since antibiotics.

If I'm staying in a hotel or I'm sleeping on my own I have the hairdryer on.

Fear not, Cesario, take thy fortunes up. Be that thou know'st thou art and then thou art as great as that thou fear'st.