My disposition as a human being is kind of a go-along-to-get-along person. I tend to trust authority.

If you want to defend torture, well then go ahead. But please spare me any sermons about the law ever again.

We're in an historic drought, and that demands unprecedented action.

We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.

Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.

California became the last state in the west to regulate groundwater usage. The state's first-ever mandatory water restrictions soon followed.

We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities. The consequences of this simple, devastating realization define American life.

Donald Trump is not going anywhere. And we see as calculated as these are, he has a knack for telling a certain segment of a base what they want.

Climate change is the biggest governing challenge we face. It's the biggest governing challenge I think we've ever faced.

The backlash to [Sarah] Palin's comments was swift, with veterans and veterans' groups criticizing the apparent politicization of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

By the way, most of the light that comes from the sun is green.

My dentist said to me the other day: I've enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?

There is no beginning to practice nor end to enlightenment; There is no beginning to enlightenment nor end to practice.

I saw you dancing out the ocean Running fast along the sand A spirit born of earth and water Fire flying from your hands

By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.

I'll never sing something that I've never been through. So even if I didn't write it, I have to have at least experienced it.

Our state cannot be severed, we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.

Long before the thousand millions are here, the mighty centrifugal tendency, inherent in this stock and strengthened in the United States, will assert itself.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.