“It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”

We are all living in cages with the door wide open.

Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood.

You need peers; you need people who are at the same level you are. You never know in life when you’re going to need help, and you never know who you’re going to need it from.

All democracies turn into dictatorships – but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea.

If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people.

Success is when you try to achieve your inward vision externally and have it come off the way you see it. Then YOU feel successful about it; that’s how success is measured.

Train yourself to let go of the things you fear to lose.

I’ve discovered that most critics themselves are cinematically illiterate. They don’t really know much about movies. They don’t know the history. They don’t know the technology. They don’t know anything. So for them to try to analyze it, they’re lost.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

It’s not a matter of how well can you make a movie. It’s how well can you make it under the circumstance, because there’s always circumstances. You cannot use that as an excuse.

Someday you’re going to have to learn to separate what seems to be important from what really is important.

The one way the world hasn’t changed: teaching is still the most important job.

But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences – is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

Education is the single most important job of the human race.

The older you get, the less seriously you take criticism. I’ve gotten to a point now where I ignore it completely. It’s just not relevant to me anymore.

From kindergarten to college, certain teachers engaged my curiosity and motivated me to learn. While I was not the best student, their efforts left a lasting impact.

Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.

I strongly believe in the separation of church and state. But freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion, there is a better way.

Make sure you continue to trust what you know now about yourself and stay true to what you believe in.

The dollar bill is God in the States. All those Pelican people just believe in money and nothing else.

I’d be dishonoring God if I didn’t believe I was put here on Earth to help change the world.

It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.

My mother would cry about my blindness and the hopelessness of my ever seeing, but I told her I wasn’t sad. I believed God had something for me to do.

You can be happy in any circumstances, you simply need to believe in God.