It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.

Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens.

The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

What can't be helped must be endured.

What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.

Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.

A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.

The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.

Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.

To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.

For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.

The Earth is what we all have in common.

Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.

We're here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark.

I don't have pet peeves like some people. I have whole kennels of irritation.

The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American.

Actors have no color. That's the art form.

I'm as American as Chevrolet.

I don't have to be bam, bam, bam, funny when I'm working. I can tell stories, and there's some funny in them.

I have the strangest time to get cast in anything. 'Ghost' was the same thing. Six months I had to wait for them to decide they had seen everybody possible. Why not? What limits me? I'm black? Oh, am I black?

Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine.

All I really want to do is just keep acting, and some of it will stink, and some of it will be really good, and maybe when I'm 85 and presenting an Oscar like Bette Davis did, I can look back and say, 'It was okay, I did all right.'

I used my imagination to make the grass whatever color I wanted it to be.

That's the thing about Mother Nature, she really doesn't care what economic bracket you're in.

I am the American Dream. I am the epitome of what the American Dream basically said. It said you could come from anywhere and be anything you want in this country. That's exactly what I've done.

Sitting at the table during Color Purple and looking up and suddenly realizing I was acting in front of Steven Spielberg, was pretty cool. It was pretty good.

We're born with success. It is only others who point out our failures, and what they attribute to us as failure.

When you are kind to someone in trouble, you hope they'll remember and be kind to someone else. And it'll become like a wildfire.

You've got to vote for someone. It's a shame, but it's got to be done.

Normal is just a cycle on the washing machine.

It bums me out tremendously what the church has become, and if it's got me bummed, imagine what Jesus Christ must be feeling.

Normal is in the eye of the beholder.

When I was doing ensemble theater and comedy work, I felt I had some talents. But when I started doing my shows in Berkeley and found that I could be funny on my own, I was shocked.

Everything for me is visual. That's just how my head works.

When I started, I knew I didn't fit any visual that anyone was going to lie down and take their clothes off about. Work doesn't come to me; I go out and look for it.

I don't really view communism as a bad thing.

And I don't believe that I have to stay on one side of the fence or the other. I don't believe that there is any good career move or bad career move. I believe there are only the things that make me happy.