“For the trustees to turn away from the entirely reasonable request of the students that a hearing-impaired individual be made president of the college is a very unfortunate expression of insensitivity.”

The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left’s on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.

Serving in Congress is like having a second shot at high school.

The best antidote to prejudice is reality.

I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the Army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.

I wouldn’t want [gay marriage] to go to the United States Supreme Court now because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has too many votes on this current court.

Take free speech: most of the tough cases on free speech involve very unpleasant people saying very obnoxious things.

Most people who are activists and are concerned about issues get their information from sources which reinforce their opinions and give them the facts that they want to hear.

We all have the right to call each other names. Rudeness is a deeply held constitutional value.

Ridicule is about the most powerful weapon possible.

I’m used to being in the minority. I’m a left-handed, gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.

The Moral Majority supports legislators who oppose abortions but also oppose child nutrition and day care. From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.

But when others suggested that the poor should not simply be the objects of these programs but also the subjects – that they should be actively involved in shaping the programs, making decisions about how to spend the money etc. – some of the previous supporters reconsidered.

They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won’t be able to be outraged anymore.

If people knew of ethics violations, they should have sent them to the Ethics Committee. If you think there was serious ethics violation that ought to be looked at, you don’t hold it back for retaliatory purposes.

There was a degree of interventionism in American foreign policy, the notion that we must be the superpower and we have to intervene everywhere, that I think makes no sense.

In the studio the director controls the actor’s every move, every inflection, every expression.

Cantona’s expression speaking the whole French dictionary without saying a word.

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.

I think we have to stop using the expression “alt-right.” It’s ridiculous. It’s racist, fascist, nationalist.

Everything you do counts forever. You are an expression of the whole process of creation; you are a cocreator.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It’s because I understand short attention spans.