Whoopi Goldberg looked like me, she had hair like mine, she was dark like me. I'd been starved for images of myself. I'd grown up watching a lot of American TV.

No matter where you're from, your dreams are valid.

What I've learned from myself is that I don't have to be anybody else. Myself is good enough.

You can't eat beauty, it doesn't sustain you. What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion, for yourself and those around you. That kind of beauty inflamed the heart and merchants the soul.

You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It's only when you risk failure that you discover things.

I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.

What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.

There is no shame in black beauty.

You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.

To be human is to seek perfection, and find joy in never attaining it.

I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.

I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced, vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open.

I wouldn't be comfortable, but at least I'd have marginal protection against pointy steel objects that went stab in the night.

I'm growing old, I delight in the past.

Death is funny, when you think about it. Everybody does it, but nobody knows how, exactly how.

When the size of the group supporting your cause reaches a critical mass, any legislator or elected official has to pay attention.

Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity; not stifle it.

You know economists; they're the sort of people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.

Back in the day, I used to be in the studio recording 20 hours a day. And that was all of the time. I still record a lot of hours, but I don't go as long as I used to.

The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.

Everything in food works together to create health or disease. The more we think that a single chemical characterizes a whole food, the more we stray into idiocy.