I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

People like nonfiction presented to them in a certain way, so that they don't have to think about whether it's true or not. They like it to have that imprimatur of respectability, of genuineness.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

Education is provide enlightenment for one's life.

How you look has become ridiculously disproportionate to what you do. Critics are more harsh on female presenters.

I have been studying women’s political behavior since the early 1970s and first identified the gender gap in 1980 with the help of legendary pollster Louis Harris.

... mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose.

Buddha says: "Do not flatter your benefactor!". Let one repeat this saying in a Christian church : it immediately purifies the air of everything Christian.

Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult.

It's hard to make a book episodic.

By all means, fire the customers who aren't worth the time and the trouble. But understand that the moment you insist the customer is wrong, you've just started the firing process.

If you see me coming, better step aside. A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died.

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.