Is there anyone I wouldn't take as a client? Well, I'd never represent a banker.

Is there anyone I wouldn't take as a client? Well, I'd never represent a banker.

Government is operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members such a system is embedded in slavery.

A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals rights which of course are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.

Nothing in the world is as fearsome as a bloody, battered opponent who will never surrender.

Skepticism is the father of freedom. It is like the pry that holds open the door for truth to slip in.

Homophobia whether internalized or externalized is really fear its not hatred its fear. Its fear of the truth about ourselves.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

Even more than the time when she gave birth, a mother feels her greatest joy when she hears others refer to her son as a wise learned one.

I know a lot of people struggle with the idea of Jesus and their idea of God. I think, if you don't even know what you're praying to or who you're praying to, based on what I know to be true, regardless, God's always listening.

So after the Lewinsky scandal, everything changed, and we moved from using the Bible to address the moral issues of our time, which were social, to moral issues of our time that were very personal. I have continued that relationship up until the present.

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead.

I've always been tenacious.

I just heard a very funny story about somebody who died yesterday, I'm sorry to say so but it was so absurd that you can't help laughing. And the person that was concerned about that story was laughing too.

In the Eisenhower era, when earnings over $400,000 were subject to 91 percent taxes and the world was a smaller place, you could count the truly wealthy on one hand: Getty, Dupont, Mellon, Rockefeller, though even those fortunes were being dispersed to children as the old robber barons died off.

I'm never going to be a modern gal. I love colonial. I love early American. I love a big rectangular piece of brown furniture on a hardwood floor.

The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they do not know the game.

Don't you hear people saying things you can't believe they're saying?

I was more interested in skating and the girls and traveling than I was in calculus.

Now I want to work with Octavia Spencer, because I met her and she's really funny.

I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.

Take care of your body. Its the only place you have to live.

Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal.

Well, in 1947... in Europe and in Italy especially, we thought of America as all-powerful.

Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

My mother was amazing. I guess, in our community, if you wanted to get by you had to work hard. So she cleaned offices. She did everything that you could imagine. We were really poor. But she would say, 'Where you are is not who you are.'

I can be an incredibly fabulous person, and I don't have to be in the highest heels, the tallest wig, the skimpiest outfit.

I think the kids today need to hear more about morals and values.

Touring for two years is excruciating.

Should we have background checks, waiting periods? To drive a car you have to pass a test that shows you know how to drive your car safely, you should have to do the same thing with guns.