Nothing is allowed in public, while everything is permitted behind closed doors.

The future belongs to us. I think that art is a force that can change the world.

I believe in freedom, I'm for a world without borders. But that's an ideal. On a practical level, I'm for a secular state where religion only plays a minor role.

The most important element of democracy, I believe, is the protection of minorities.

My family thought if I spent time in the military, I'd become more reasonable, a bit calmer. But I've always been extreme in what I do - both as a believer and a nonbeliever.

I was a very devout boy and one day I heard the music of an Egyptian Koran singer in the mosque. The melancholy of this music touched me so deeply that it brought me to tears.

Fundamentalists can't take a joke. Ever. They want us to blindly obey, parrot everything they do, and believe in their dogmas.

I'm a musician; I have to perform. I can't give up. I have to be even more courageous. We know that we have a lot of enemies. Not only in Iran. But that doesn't matter.

I lived in the world of poetry and ideas. I thought life was all about art and philosophy. In the military, I suddenly found out about the real world.

The more grateful you are, the more you attract things to be grateful for.

To be sure, the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, even when it takes you through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Just watch out for parasites.

I'm just excited to be a part of the movie [Star Wars]. It's always the particulars that are the most exciting.

So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.

Loving everything about yourself - even the 'unacceptable' - is an act of personal power. It is the beginning of healing.

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.

Give government the weapons to fight your enemy and it will use them against you.

What a lot of people don't know, because in a lot of TV and movies, they have a lot of men talking about computers - it was a woman who invented the first compiler!

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

Usually, the subject matter of the image is not the subject of the work.