All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

At heart, we're all violent raging wolves, but in our actions we can be pacifists.

There is a fundamental shift that social media necessitates in business today - the need to transition from 'Me First' to 'We First' thinking.

Appropriation was the language of my generation in many ways. It came out of Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein.

Telling lies and showing off to get attention are mistakes I made that I don't want my kids to make.

To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.

If you don't like something about yourself, change it. If you're OK with it, you gotta own it. There's nothing in between.

Work with people who I feel like I'm on the same page with, there's no amount of money in the world that compares to that.

Love is like wildflowers; It's often found in the most unlikely places.

To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.

Everything that I play as an actress is a different aspect of me.