I want to get better as an actor, to keep trying to work harder, trying to discover something different. In some ways, it's a pretty frightening experience. But normally, I do tend to walk against fear and hope that I'll be able to survive.

We're supposed to be an example of freedom, and if we are doing things that are injustice to people, then what is our statement?

I try to be like a forest, revitalizing and constantly growing... Kids would tease me, calling me 'Little Bush.' But... I thought being called Forest helped me find my identity.

I go back and forth between indie and studio because I feel like it, not because I feel obligated to do one or the other.

In high school, I did some musicals, but I never took acting until college. I was studying opera, classical voice, and a speech teacher asked me to audition for this play, and I got the lead.

Directing is more comfortable for me because, as an actor, there's always something inherently false. Because I'm not that person.

Our leaders must hear us speaking on behalf of our brothers and sisters in South Sudan. If the moral duty to save lives and work toward peace is not compelling enough to drive decision-makers, we must remind them that we care and will hold them accountable.

It rests in the hands of the common person as well as those with the power to shape humanity's course toward a world where every child, woman and man's most basic needs are met.

In some sense, when you take a child soldier out of an armed group, you've taken away the identity he or she has had for years, and you can't assume life is just going to return to normal.

I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers - smart, kind, good kids - who got drawn into gangs and violence, and their futures were going to be forever scarred by that.

Many of the wars we see around the world start as domestic conflicts that are fueled by external forces and powers. My view is that we can help peace if we help communities transform from the inside, on their own terms.

I think that cinema and the arts are central in our lives because we grow up and learn about the world through our exposure to stories. Parents use them as a tool to teach their children fundamental truths and values, much as adults can view them to gain exposure to cultures and individuals that they'd never be able to view in their own lives.

I try to support stories that enable us to see the difficulties in our society and the challenges we face, which is why I've also produced documentaries like 'Brick City' and 'Serving Life.'

I see a deep connection between peace and change: peace always starts from within, for communities and people alike. The same is true of change: real change starts from within.

Give up the thought that you have control. You don't. The best you can do is adapt, anticipate, be flexible, sense the environment and respond.

Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.

To survive and even thrive in a changing world, nature offers another great lesson: the survivors are those who at the least adapt to change, or even better learn to benefit from change and grow intellectually and personally. That means careful listening and constant learning.

What I want to do is encourage women to take on this incredibly exciting and fun challenge to use their brains for the benefit of humanity but through science and technology.

Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

I thought to myself: What are the most important problems that society faces that I could contribute to? And it was clear that finding new sustainable sources of energy was the most important.

The DNA-encoded catalytic machinery of the cell can rapidly learn to promote new chemical reactions when we provide new reagents and the appropriate incentive in the form of artificial selection.

I studied mechanical engineering at Princeton and worked on solar energy after graduation.

What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.

Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.

My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.

We've been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.

I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can't we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?

I think of what I do as copying nature's design process.

You never know what will happen tomorrow.

I'm an engineer by training.

I get called lots of things - a biochemist, a molecular biologist, a chemical engineer - and I guess I am all of those. I identify most as human!

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.

I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.

Nature is solving all sorts of problems that we throw at her - how to degrade plastic bottles, how to degrade pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics. She creates new enzymes in response to that all the time, in real time.

I was employed at the Solar Energy Research Institute in the late '70s when Carter was president, and as a country, we had a goal of renewable energy development.

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.

All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, making things in a cleaner fashion.

I can't imagine not being able to read and write, or make these connections from literature and philosophy that have helped inform my understanding of evolution.

Someone asked me 'What's the funniest thing or what's the best thing that you've ever done?' It's always what I'm doing now.

So many things in my life have gone awry.

We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.

I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.

Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, 'Oh, I want a cure for cancer,' but that doesn't tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?

I did all sorts of things that you wouldn't normally find on an engineer's docket, but it made an educated person out of me.

We've been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years - look at a poodle! So we've created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn't be here were it not for us.

Only by ignorance is science threatened.

I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure.

I was lucky to be passionate about a field that was full of opportunity.