I studied psychology for a couple of years as a personal hobby, so you start learning about people and listening to your intuition, like when you you're feeling that people are not being entirely straight with you.
I have a very close friend who is a brilliant clown, and I always wanted to do a show with him. So I did one year at La MaMa Theatre. I had not done stilts before that show, and I had about two weeks to learn how to do that, and they were just made with off-off Broadway money. The ones that I had in Rogue One were made by [Industrial Light & Magic]. So they were really easy. They were made with actual prosthetic feet on the bottom. They were athletic, in a way. I could run in them. There was a bounce to them that I could use.
We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.
I want something else; a different system entirely. One not seen on this earth for thousands of years. If ever. Democratic Womanism. Notice how this word has "man" right in the middle of it? That's one reason I like it. He is right there, front and center. But he is surrounded. I want to vote and work for a way of life that honors the feminine.
The bottom line is that it's hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts. And what makes America complicated as well is the degree to which this is not just a black/white society, and it is becoming less so every year.
I will never turn Medicare into a voucher. No American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies. They should retire with the care and dignity they have earned.
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I've lived here for sixteen years.
I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president - with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln - just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we've got a lot more work to do. And we're gonna keep on at it.
It is better to allow our lives to speak for us than our words. God did not bear the cross only two thousand years ago. He bears it today, and he dies and is resurrected from day to day. It would be a poor comfort to the world if it had to depend on a historical God who died two thousand years ago. Do not, then, preach the God of history, but show him as he lives today through you.