“A really great actor, in a lucky performance, can transform himself or herself. I’ve seen actors do that.”

I dont see we can have a separation of church and state in this government if you have to pass a religious test to get in this government.

I try to find out what there is in the character that in a way, you can’t put into words. If I could put it into words, then it wouldn’t be a performance. And if I do put it into words, as I play it, I start to get boxed in by those words.

I’m in the real world, some people try to steal from me, and I stop them, frequently, take them to court. I love a good lawsuit. It’s fun.

But often it’s a mechanical transformation, which isn’t as interesting, and you’ve got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.

This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people’s holding beliefs other than their own?

It’s always better to be wise than to be smart.

The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.

When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.

So every day till the end of this campaign, Ill answer any question anyone has on government, but if you have a question on religion, please, go to church.

That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.

My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

Nothing important was ever accomplished without chutzpah. Columbus had chutzpah. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah.

Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don’t leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for ‘Scientific American Frontiers.’

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me.

I’m very interested in the improvisation because one of the things I do is to help train scientists to communicate in a better way and more personal way when they’re making a presentation, and I use improvisation to do that.

Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer destiny.

Whatever the mind sets itself on is what the man walks after.

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.

Look after the present and the future will look after itself.

It is the nature of the self to manifest itself, In every atom slumbers the might of the self.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing.

Become vision itself.