Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.
i don't regret the difficulties I experienced; I think they help helped me to become the person I am today. i feel the way a warrior must feel after years of traning; he doesn't remember the details of everything he learned, but he knows how to strik...
When I travel overseas on many occasions, I get pulled out because I may be buying a one-way ticket, I may be traveling with my sister and we have different last names. That's smart profiling. Just pulling people out one at a time when we have millio...
I think with comedy I get very sort of critical of myself and try and do the best I can and it doesn't come as second nature. I work at those kinds of films. It doesn't mean I can't do them - I've done two now, and I have a great time doing them, but...
We fought in 1974 - that was a long time ago. After 1981, we became the best of friends. By 1984, we loved each other. I am not closer to anyone else in this life than I am to Muhammad Ali. Why? We were forged by that first fight in Zaire, and our li...
I wanted to be involved in music and I felt I needed to get in quick. I didn't want to spend four years in college and then hope for the best. I gave myself a year, which is why I kept pushing people for a chance. I literally felt my whole life was i...
I feel like I'm a New Yorker because I really know the city. I actually tell the drivers where to go - I have this bad habit, I always question the drivers. I do that all the time because I feel like I know the best way, when really it's like, 'Yo, m...
My best friend growing up really put the bug in my ear about acting. We created this one hour-and-a-half improv play when we were 10 or 11 and performed it at the library. We just played off each other so well and had the best time doing it and the f...
I think everybody has their pain. For me, the time that I really had to grow up was when I was 15 and I had my best friend die of leukemia. Watching somebody so strong go through that is definitely something that will give you a little bit of depth. ...
I just moved into a new house, so I love spending time at home. Everything for me is all about self-care because I really feel that if I'm at my best, than I'm able to come to my job and really be feeling the best, so if I'm not working out or going ...
Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a yea...
I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be ...
I had a dream about you. You were so cute, and I was holding you for a long time. We went for a walk, happily strutting down the street. We saw a couple others but they weren’t having as much fun as we were. We arrived back home and I gave you a ki...
As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I’m looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time betw...
...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who h...
Instead of practicing philoxenos, which means loving the stranger, we find many times that the church is xenophobic. We forget that Jesus, whom we claim to follow, was the ultimate lover of otherness in people. Even differences in religion didn't fre...
Don’t worry,” he said, that grandfatherly smile spreading across his face once more, “I’ve been fishing for over forty years. You’ve got plenty of time to catch up, maybe even pass what I’ve done. You’re a perspicacious piscatorial ...
They lied, you know,” said Cpl. Allan Richmond. He hugged the wall next to Owens. Beside him, PFC Bucky Hatton crouched low, a Browning 1911 semiautomatic gripped tightly in his hand. “Who?” asked Bart, glad to be out of the wind and rain, even...
He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another o...
What are the gifts given to we who live Below?" "Long life, health, strength, and happiness." "What is the curse of those who live Above?" "Short life, illness, weakness, and misery." "Is this fair?" "It is fair. It is as the gods decreed at the time...
He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring?...