Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.

If we don't figure out a way to create equity, real equity, of opportunity and access, to good schools, housing, health care, and decent paying jobs, we're not going to survive as a productive and healthy society.

Failure is a great learning tool.

We live in a big world. We are citizens of the world, and we make movies for everybody around the world. I think it's very important to understand what people's life experiences, good and bad, are.

The album 'Cheers to the Fall' is really kind of me breaking out and being like, 'Listen, I don't care about criticism, and I don't care about possibility of failure. I'm going to do it. And if I do fail, well then, here's to it.'

Soul music is true to its name. It's music that connects to your soul, your spirit. When music resonates with people's spirit like that, when people can emotionally connect with something or it helps to heal them, transform them, that never goes out of style. People will always need something to relate to.

I gleaned different style ideas over the years. In Southern California, there is a big rockabilly sub-culture. So when I would go to car shows, I would see women dressed like this. I had a teacher in high school that always had her Bette Paige bangs.

His advice to me is basically to just love what you do and don't let the fear of failure stop you.

Blood relatives often have nothing to do with family, and similarly, family is about who you choose to make your life with.

Father or stepfather - those are just titles to me. They don't mean anything.

Fathers in today's modern families can be so many things.

George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.

One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.

There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.

A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers.

You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.

I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.

The gift of sobriety is clarity and a sense of connection - and travel only enhances that.

It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

I met Ashley two weeks before I married him. It was a joke-the most ridiculous thing I've ever done. Once I was married, I didn't want to be a failure, so I stuck it out for six months, which was about six months too long.

Your life changes. Everything has to be done perfectly, and I didn't follow that. I lived my life as if I wasn't in the public eye. I thought, 'I'm young. I have the right to experience new things, and if I want to go to a bar and get drunk, that's my prerogative.'

If God wanted us to be naked, why did he invent sexy lingerie?

For a while I couldn't leave the house by myself. Even if I was just grocery shopping alone, I'd get self-conscious.

Everybody deserves a second chance in this world. That's basically all I ask.

The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

God invented concubinage, satan marriage.

I often find myself quoting from Victor Hugo after one of my theatrical ventures. 'Now that my play is a failure,' he once said, 'I find I love it all the more.' I first quoted that after 'Square Rounds' at the Olivier in 1992.

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.

I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry.

Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.'

You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light.

The biggest lesson I had in my life was failure.

This is how I started: My mom was crazy for antique shops and junk shops, and my sister and I would play this game where, if we were driving with my parents and saw a junk shop or an antique shop, we'd scream at the top of our lungs. My poor father would have heart failure and screech to a halt, and we'd leap out and go and explore.

What an electric thrill it sends up and down the spine, how it sets the heart racing: A Royal Romance! A Royal Wedding! The pomp and the pageantry!

The first week in intelligence school, you learn there are only two conditions in life. There is policy success, or there is intel failure. There is no other condition in life.

I have always accepted intelligence was an honorable profession. We are all mindful of the need to comply with our moral values and the law.

Typically, people in the intelligence community are just going to kind of hunker down and do their job, do their mission. And I believe - I have great faith in them. I think they will continue to serve up truth to power even if the power chooses not to listen to the truth.

The history of the intelligence community is replete with violations of the trust of the American people.

It is not the intelligence community's place to set and implement policy.

I was a part of the decision-making in the Pentagon, when I was the undersecretary for intelligence, to start CYBERCOM, both as a sub-unified command and under a dual-hat arrangement. That was never intended to be permanent in any event.

A key player with respect to sanctions is, of course, China. And so, if a military option were to be exercised, then obviously we would play very heavily in that process. But that's not a decision, fortunately, that the intelligence community makes.

The Russians are bent on establishing both a presence in the Western Hemisphere, and they're looking for opportunities to expand military cooperation: sell equipment, air bases, as well as intelligence gathering facilities.

I had served in the Republic of Korea in the early '80s while I was on active duty as a director of intelligence for U.S. forces Korea, and kind of followed developments on the peninsula ever since.

It's certainly not helpful when the commander in chief is a critic of the intelligence community.

I do think - the metaphor I always use - it's the role of intelligence community to stay down in the engine room and shovel that intelligence coal, and people on the bridge get to decide where to drive the ship and how fast and how to arrange all the deckchairs.

The Intelligence Community Assessment concluded first that President Putin directed and influenced a campaign to erode the faith and confidence of the American people in our presidential election process. Second, that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton, and third, that he sought to advantage Mr. Trump.