Be calm in the face of all common disgraces.
Governments, whether they're dictatorships or democracies, reflect the people. When the people get fed up, they throw them out.
The catch-all phrase "the war on terrorism", in all honesty, has no more meaning than if one wants to wage a war against "criminal gangsterism". Terrorism is a tactic. You can't have a war against a tactic. It's deliberately vague and non-definable in order to justify and permit perpetual war anywhere and under any circumstance.
Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.
I lean toward a flat tax. But I want to make it real flat, like ZERO.
People should not be able to vote to take away the rights of others.
When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we, in essence, accept that the state owns our bodies.
A lot of filmmakers from my generation were lucky enough to have their work more or less perpetuated by people who saw them originally on TV and on HBO and certainly on home video.
There's a guy in California who was voting 24 years after he died. I mean, so to suggest to us that people who are concerned about honest elections are somehow nutty, I think, is a mistake.
People say to me, 'You seem to have made this conscious decision to do independent films'. In reality, I haven't. After each movie, I always think, 'how different can I possibly be? Is this going to challenge me, is this going to inspire me, and is this going to make me love my job more than I already do?'
It is my private life which no one knows anything about, nor ever will. It needs more than half my time if it is to be a success.