“Leaders should be collaborative, modest, and generous”

Give to another human being without the expectation of a return.

Trying to take money out of politics is like trying to take jumping out of basketball.

I might lose because I wasn’t tall enough; I might lose because I wasn’t fast enough. But I wasn’t going to lose because I wasn’t ready.

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, ‘Just watch!’

A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both.

When you’re not practicing, someone somewhere is. And when the two of you meet, assuming roughly equal ability, the other person will win.

Tax (reform) is ultimately a decision about values.

Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.

Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.

Basketball can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish impulses.

Working with the UN’s diplomacy and development arms, we can prevent minor differences from escalating into wars.

When you make speeches you elicit expectations against which you will be held accountable.

There has never been a great athlete who died not knowing what pain is.

When conflicts do break out, UN peacekeepers should play a role in defusing and settling them. Without giving up our sovereignty, we can help the UN with better training and better command and control in order to develop more effective peacekeeping forces.

The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices

When the playing is over, one can sense that one’s youth has been spent playing a game, and now both the game and youth are gone.

What happens is that the experience of writers working together and the idea of creative collaboration is so delightful, but it has been relegated to TV.

I think people underestimate the value of collaboration, especially for writers.

I believe [the architecture firm] Herzog and de Meuron and our collaboration made the product the best it could be.

He is fearless and the way he comes to the music is like we share the same passion for what we do and with somebody from the West. In my opinion that would be a great collaboration.

The future of cinema and communications is all about collaboration and the decentralized control of storytelling.

Basically, I enter into it knowing we are collaborators.

The most abundant resources that we possess amongst the 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States are passion and knowledge, yet our most scarce resource is collaboration.

Filmmaking is such a collaborative piece of art that you can’t look to one person – you couldn’t look to me, you couldn’t say, ‘Because Vin’s in it, it’s this or that.’ It’s really all of us coming together for that period of time to try and make magic.