In foreign affairs we must make up our minds that whether we wish it or not, we are a great people and must play a great part in the world. It is not open to us to choose whether we will play that great part or not.
I'm not comfortable being around too many people. I don't like being out in public too much. I don't like going to bars. I don't like doing celebrity stuff. So most of the characters I play are people who don't always feel comfortable beyond their small circle of friends.
When you're young and you play music, you have a peer group, you come out of a scene. There's a lot of people you know, and then you have some success, and it all goes away.
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
The virtue you would like to have, assume it is already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in... the part he plays.
Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play.