“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

“Instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”

“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”

“It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the internet.”

“As people do better, they start voting like Republicans. Unless they have too much education, then they vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.”

“Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.”

“I’m a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being…by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”

“Talk is cheap and action is louder, money is louder than that.”

“Even though correct, the statement “Freedom isn’t Free” is very insulting to me. False freedom is very expensive. Fake freedom costs about two billion of our tax dollars a week; phony freedom has cost the Iraqi people tens of thousands of innocent lives; fanciful freedom has meant the destruction of a country and its infrastructure.”

“Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.”

“It’s fun to see an unknown about to become a star, less fun to see a star about to become unknown.”

“We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease.”

“We don’t necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people.”

“Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater.”

“Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

“Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”

“We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves, how much clean air do we need?”

“All art is an abstraction to some degree.”