I [give] maybe the long-winded speeches that not everybody reads, but I can also do a slow jam on Jimmy Fallon better than most.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

Since when did the American Dream become the American Guarantee?

A man often runs the risk of throwing away a witticism if he admits that it is his own.

In my experience, if you go to a hospital for any reason whatsoever, including to read the gas meter, they give you a tetanus shot.

God answers prayers, but he doesn't always answer it your way.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

I wrote many songs about UFOs.

I loved doing My Favorite Year, which was great fun, and The Ruling Class, which I made with all my chums.

Reason and right give the quickest despatch.

Actually, when I did "10,000 B.C.," in the middle of production, I wanted to quit my job, because everything went wrong.

Racism is to the current era what unAmericanism was to the Fifties: a curse word that provides a handy substitute for logical thought.