Great Quotes

Acting is something I love. It's a great craft that I have a lot of respect for. But I don't think it's any greater challenge than teaching 8-year-olds or any other career. In my life, I try not to make it more important than it is and I just hope that rubs off on the people around me.

I had spent some time in the outback, but to meet Aboriginals and work with them was wonderful. It gave me a great appreciation of how tough life is and about the indomitable spirit that the Aboriginal people have always possessed.

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

The great thieves lead away the little thief.

I will always listen to my coaches. But first I listen to my body. If what they tell me suits my body, great. If my body doesn't feel good with what they say, then always my body comes first.

Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts.

I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.

A team will always appreciate a great individual if he's willing to sacrifice for the group.

Great players are willing to give up their own personal achievement for the achievement of the group. It enhances everybody.

To be a liar, you've got to have a great memory, and I don't have a memory.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

Comedians work great as actors because they're good under pressure. With a lot of actors, you have to make them feel like everything's going really well to get a good performance out of them. But, if you have a comedian on the set, you can tell them, 'Hey, you really are screwing this up,' and then they just get better.

A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.

Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.

Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.

I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.

Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

The newspapers turn a blind eye to how they get their material as long as they have great photographs.