Quotes

If I die unexpectedly, can everyone just do the right thing and pretend I was a way better person than I am?

I will promise you that if I can give you two good scenes -- which is what I always try to do in every movie -- then I feel like I'm doing my job.

There’s a reason survivors choose not to go to the police, and that’s because they’re treated as the criminals. The rapists are innocent until proven guilty, but survivors are guilty until proven innocent - at least in the eyes of the police.

Please, please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks it doesn’t matter how people are dressed or how they move their bodies - we should still treat them with respect and decency. And enough with the slut shaming. Please. Goddamn, I’m not responsible for some perverted 45 year-old dad lusting after me because I have a sparkly dress on and a big ass for a teenager. And if you think I am, then maybe you’re part of the problem.

We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington’s elites — politicians and intellectuals — miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today’s world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.

In battle, combatants engaged in war against America get no due process and may lawfully be killed. But citizens not in a battlefield - however despicable - are guaranteed a trial by our Constitution. No one argues that Americans who commit treason shouldn’t be punished. The maximum penalty for treason is death. But the Constitution specifies the process necessary to convict.

In both darker and lighter versions of fairy tales, a woman’s suffering is demanded in exchange for true love and happily ever after. She must be trapped in a tower or poisoned by an apple or forced to spin straw into gold. She must wait for the hand of a man who is fooled - not once, but twice - before he finds her. Throughout any given season of “The Bachelor,” the women exclaim that the experience is like a fairy tale. They suffer the machinations of reality television, pursuing — along with several other women, often inebriated — the promise of happily ever after. Instead of bleeding from the foot to fit a golden slipper, they bleed their dignity, one episode at a time.

[Monica] Lewinsky writes of how her whole personhood, her whole adulthood, was marked and shaped by the sexual actions she took in her early twenties. It may seem, in comparison, that Hillary [Clinton]—already powerful and accomplished by the time the scandal erupted—escaped comparatively unscathed. Her power has surely only grown in the decades since the impeachment saga. But the legitimacy of that power is constantly questioned, by those on the right and on the left, based on the time her husband dallied with Lewinsky.

Calling a white male 'privileged' in a country with such a clear history and continuing pattern of preference for white males is about as wrong as calling a rich person 'advantaged' in a capitalist society. The word privilege isn’t a negative judgment about [Tal] Fortgang or his character, but simply a recognition that our society’s institutionalized racism and sexism isn’t aimed at white males.

The coming firestorm over new power-plant regulations won’t be a genuine debate — just as there isn’t a genuine debate about climate science. Instead, the airwaves will be filled with conspiracy theories and wild claims about costs, all of which should be ignored. Climate policy may finally be getting somewhere; let’s not let crazy climate economics get in the way.

This is not Armatrix screwing over the people of New Jersey. It's the legislature screwing over the people of New Jersey.

I am a little jet lagged from my trip to Malaysia...The lengths we have to go to to get CNN coverage these days.