We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

History is written by those who win and those who dominate.

You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.

Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

Is there a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone?

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

I tried on different versions of myself. I was so many different girls...

Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible.

I think I deliberately sold out a couple of times. I picked the songs that I thought would do well in the marketplace, even though I didn't really love the song.

In the midst of regular life, running is the touchstone that breathes adventure into my soul.

I learned very quickly that the hard thing in life is to make good films. Technically, filmmaking is the camera and the actor telling the story and that's what I'm more interested in doing.

You have had presidential candidates over the last 30 years who would have had a very hard time getting nominated under the old system. One example is John Kennedy.

People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.