If I had any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva.

I can't imagine what this place would be - I can't imagine what the country would be - with Donald Trump as our president.

It is not women's liberation, it is women's and men's liberation.

It's a facet of the gay rights movement that people don't think about enough. Why suddenly marriage equality? Because it wasn't until 1981 that the court struck down Louisiana's 'head and master rule,' that the husband was head and master of the house.

The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.

Marty was an extraordinary person. Of all the boys I had dated, he was the only one who really cared that I had a brain. And he was always - well, making me feel that I was better than I thought I was.

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus' famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out.

Collegiality is crucial to the success of our mission. We could not do the job the Constitution assigns to us if we didn't - to use one of Justice Antonin Scalia's favorite expressions - 'Get over it!'

How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?

Dissents speak to a future age.

Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

You can't have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they're men or women.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

All I can say is I am sensitive to discrimination on any basis because I have experienced that upset.

The Sixth Amendment secures to persons charged with crime the right to be tried by an impartial jury reflecting a fair cross-section of the community.

Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

I don't think I have ever thought of myself as a movie star. I think when I was about seven, I thought it must be lovely to have an Oscar. But the more involved you are in this business, the more that pretence disappears, and you really get to see what you love about it, and what I love is working.

I use the term 'spine' for people when I think that they may seem on the surface sort of reticent, shy, self-deprecating, shying away from the spotlight. Quiet.

I was moved by the 'Lovings' story because of my own background as a mixed-race person.

I trained, went to college, trained, and got a job. Then got another job. When I wasn't working I worked at a bar, then got another job.

I think if you don't risk something in art, it's not really important.

I don't like the term 'colour-blind' - because I don't want people to be blind to my colour.

I've met loads of black and brown and various people who are well into comics.

When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn't experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you're black. A kind of lifting of the veil.

What I have wanted to do is take roles that are unexpected for people who look like me. Roles that the establishment would say, 'Oh, she couldn't possibly be that.'

The idea that you must treat actors a certain way in order to get a performance out of them kind of disturbs me, and it's disregarding what we do. Our job is to do our job.

History is written by the winners. My job as an artist is to speak up for those who might be perceived as the losers. Or those who can't shout.

I don't think I've necessarily been able to pick and choose in my career; I don't know how many people do. But I'll tell you what I've been able to do: I've been able to say no. It is the only thing you can hold on to sometimes, is that ability to say 'no.' And I think that in that way, you can create some kind of career.

In many ways, playing a real person is slightly easier because you have a road map. When you're playing someone fictitious, there's myriad ways in. With a real person, there's boundaries, and that sometimes makes the work easier.

Stories about race and identity pique my interest for obvious reasons. That's in my body, my brain, my history, my memories - it's all part of my toolbox as an actor.

I'm all for philosophical debates about race, but if you look at history, you see that the status quo has power when it's unchallenged. So these conversations about inequality are crucial.

I don't trust anyone who doesn't change their mind.

My whole life is an interracial relationship! It's inescapable. I am who I am.

I think that is important, to not make people feel alien.

America has a black president, but there are no black studio heads, and there just aren't that many black people working anywhere on film sets, let alone in positions of power in Hollywood. That's what needs to change.

Ireland is home. And I'd love to move home. That's always been the plan.

When I was little, I thought that everyone wanted to hold me as a baby because I was this thing of fascination. But rather than this thing that wasn't quite right, I just felt that my difference was something that was probably very exotic.

When you connect to someone on a human level, and you get to know about them, you can begin to love the things that make them different. That's when fear dissipates, and that's when we can live the life that we're all supposed to be living.

When you connect to someone on a human level, and you get to know about them, you can begin to love the things that make them different.

I'm not the most articulate person.

I don't know why women aren't allowed to have the same sort of breadth and scope and flaws of men.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.