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.

I personally hold Blair more responsible for this war than I do George Bush. The reason is, Blair knows better, Blair is not an idiot. What is he doing hanging around this guy?

The majority of Americans, the ones who never elected George W. Bush, are not fooled by his weapons of mass distraction.

A majority of this country opposes this war, a majority of this country never voted for this administration.

If there ever is a struggle, making a good movie will always supersede the need to be noble.

There's politics in all aspects of our daily lives.

As you have fewer and fewer voices in a democracy, in a free society, it's not good to limit the number of voices.

But I'm not a member of the Democratic Party. If you know anything about me, anybody who's followed me, I'm the anti-Democrat. I have railed against the Democrats for a long time.

Part of my job is to read the paper, watch C-Span and show things that haven't been shown or were buried.

I'm not a pundit. I'm not an analyst. I don't want to participate in the existing debate that's going on about whether or not you should be able to have as many guns as you want to have or that guns are even the problem.

I'm used to my films having little effect on making the world a better place.

I think I'm in the majority of Americans. I believe that I am in the mainstream of middle America.

And realising that humour is the most powerful way to make a political statement and say the things that you want to say. And it's not used enough, at least not in the U.S.

If anything, I don't have to convince the American public that we have a broken health-care system. I think the majority of Americans since they have to go through that health-care system, already know it.

Bush's presidency is revisionism-proof. We're going to be recovering from it for the rest of our lives.

I watch way too much C-SPAN.

I certainly believe that I have no right to tell another couple whether they can or cannot be married.

Every night I watch the nightly news. It's funded by the pharmaceutical companies. Virtually every ad is a drug ad. They get their say every night on the nightly news through advertising.

I take much of the attacks and the criticism toward me as being very class-based, but as Americans we don't like to acknowledge that reality.

I'm interested to see what happens with Fox News and phone hacking. I really can't believe it just happens in Great Britain. Because really, who cares about just hacking phones over there?

For a documentary filmmaker, I do very well.

There's no violence coming from the Occupy protesters.

My films don't have instant impact because they're dense with ideas that people have not thought about. It takes a while for the American public to wrap its head around some of the things I'm saying.

Halliburton is not a 'company' doing business in Iraq. It is a war profiteer, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars, they would have been arrested - or worse.

I think as a filmmaker my first contribution would just be to make a good movie that people would love to see and leave the theatre charged, with a sense of excitement.

What I'm asking for is a new economic order. I don't know how to construct that; I'm not an economist.

One day there'll be no need for me. I'm actually hoping to put myself out of business.