When I make a film, I'm not doing it purely for political reasons. If I just wanted to do that, I'd run for office.

What really went wrong is that General Motors has had this philosophy from the beginning that what's good for General Motors is good for the country. So, their attitude was, 'We'll build it and you buy it. We'll tell you what to buy. You just buy it.'

It's a lot of hard work to do a weekly TV show. It's certainly not fun.

When you come from the working class and you do well enough whereby you can provide a little bit better for your family, get a decent roof over their head and send them to a good school, that's considered a good thing.

When the women's liberation movement began, when people began protesting against the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, at the beginning of those movements, the majority of the country was not with them, did not believe in the basic principles of any of those philosophies.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

I don't talk in sound bites.

I mean if politics was my main motivation I would be doing politics. But I'm a filmmaker.

How could a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, have... plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets?

It should be a crime to make a profit off somebody being sick.

I do believe that we are to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute you. I believe that there is power and strength in that.

I'm from the Midwest, and guys like me don't go on diets. We don't do well on spinning classes.

Most liberals I know were for invading Afghanistan right after 9/11.

The idea that cinema can be dangerous is a great idea.

There is nowhere in the four Gospels where Jesus uses the word 'homosexual.'

North Korea has taught a great lesson to all the countries in the world, especially the rogue countries of dictatorships or whatever: if you don't want to be invaded by America, get some nuclear weapons.

Sometimes it's important to vote - you know, to make a statement, to make a point; certainly, many of us who were involved in the Nader campaign in 2000 felt that way.

Comedy is a great slayer of rogues in power.

Army Specialist Bradley Manning deserves a medal, not prison.

New York City has become a place where it's not easy for the working class to even live.

Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil.

There's been almost a dozen films that have been made against me. There's actually more films made attacking me than films I've made.

Most Americans are very responsible.

The wealthy have never liked to pay for the labor that enriches them. Ever since slavery was eliminated, they have been trying to keep it as close to slavery as they can without violating the slave laws.

Documentaries are a form of journalism.

No 22-year-old should have to enter the real world already in a virtual debtors' prison.

Television has its own award. It's called the Emmy. It's a good award. I like it. I have one. But you don't see movies like 'The King's Speech' win Oscars and then go to TV and qualify for Emmys. In documentaries, some networks have been able to game the system.

The days of using my name as a pejorative are now over. The right wing turned me into an accidental spokesperson for the liberal, majority agenda.

I'm going to guess Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, all want clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. I'm sure most people think women should be paid the same as men if they're doing the same job. I think we all want good schools for our kids. If we made that list, we actually are in agreement on more things.

Listen friends, you have to face the truth: You are never going to be rich... The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever.

Clearly I am a person who suffers from a lack of ego.

We as Americans believe it's OK to kill people. We believe it's OK to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We think it's OK to invade a country where we think Osama Bin Laden is and he's in the other country. So we just go in and we just kill. And we have the death penalty; we sanction it.

'Zero Dark Thirty' is a disturbing, fantastically-made movie. It will make you hate torture.

There should be no private health insurance companies operating for profit.

We're never gonna get rid of crazy people. They've been around for thousands of years - they'll continue to be around; they'll continue to do horrible things.

No one is entertained by economics.

I - honestly, I don't know of a worse lie one could tell other than a lie to take a country to war. To make up things to take people to war. That's just got to be the most obscene, immoral thing to do.

I went without health insurance until 'Roger & Me,' basically - from about age 20 till about age 35. With 'Roger & Me,' I joined the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild, and since then I've had excellent health care managed by the union.

If you're in a diabetic or prediabetic state, it's good to have medication to go on for a period of time. But simply by making the changes - get your sleep, 35 grams of fiber and a half-hour walk - your cholesterol will come down, your sugar will come down, and your blood pressure will come down. Only the minority of people can't control it.

When I'm shooting a movie, I'm always in an invisible theater seat. I respect the fact that people have worked hard all week and want to go to the movies on the weekend and be entertained.

One thing I've learned about death threats is that they're great, actually. You should actually be grateful for death threats because those who are taking the time to threaten you that way are getting it out of their system. That's really what they rant to do, yell at you, and they want to threaten you.

If one job doesn't pay all the bills, don't worry. You can get another one and another one and another one.

White people scare the crap out of me.

Wall Street, the banks, and corporate America, has been able to call the shots here. They control our members of Congress and they get what they want.

If you reduce the guns and the ammo, you'll reduce the murders.

I don't like to sit around whining about the corporate media, how they control everything, own everything. We already know that.

I don't even like DVDs. Honest to God, in my lifetime, I might have rented a dozen DVDs, literally gone into a video store and rented a dozen DVDs in my lifetime, because I don't like to see movies that way. I like to see them on the big screen.

Four hundred obscenely wealthy individuals, 400 little Mubaraks - most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008 - now have more cash, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined.

I've always felt so grateful that I dropped out of school, that I never had to do a thesis. I wouldn't know how to organise and structure myself to film so that B follows A and C follows B.

I like America to some extent.