People use the guise of art, and artistic expression, to do all kinds of hateful things. It's like Trump and everybody else using the guise of humor to say hateful things, the excuse being, 'I was just being funny.'
There are some really great books that have been written about slavery, but I don't think that the discourse about it in society has been very accurate or healthy. I don't think we've come up with ways to tell it that don't insult people or hit them in the wrong way. Part of the problem is that most people don't really understand what slavery was anyway. Most white people didn't own slaves. Slavery was a way of life, just like driving cars is a way of life now. It doesn't mean that it was right.
I remember back to my days as a teenager. When you get your feelings hurt, you feel that moment of embarrassment. You think: "No one wants to talk to me ever again. It's all over." I reassure people that's totally not the case. These bullies are just hateful people doing hateful things. Sometimes, it's a lesson in tough love, but you keep positive, smile in the face of hateful adversity and move on. It makes you a stronger person.
[...] it is generally accepted that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. That, at best, is a half-truth. Slavery was an issue, but the primary force for war was a clash between the economic interests of the North and the South. Even the issue of slavery itself was based on economics.
I don't think it's an ethical or moral issue, or even that people are stupid, but I do feel like as a culture things are out of balance, perverted, and inverted. Things that are ridiculous are worshipped, and things that are important are ridiculed. I think that's something worth thinking about.
There are some superficial things that connect me to the stream. There's instrumentation, there's timbre, use of electronics, the way that samples are used, the way the electric guitar is used. I'm thinking of things that are particular to this era. But I don't always feel particularly close to the music of my peers. I often feel that I have more in common with writers and visual artists. I try to connect to people in an emotional kind of way.
Some people plan their life out, and it occurs. Others have things they're thinking about, and things don't go that way.
The way I look at it is, when you allow people to submerge themselves into a story, they will react by thinking through what it's about. That's just so much more fun and effective, I think, than a lecture.
When people start thinking of you more as a persona, they are less inclined to allow you to move into different areas. Sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes they're just very stereotypical or restricted in their own thinking of what they'll allow you to do.
The thing that I love about acting is the fact that I can help people feel things, know themselves or feel less alone. It's my form of expression, in the same way that someone might paint a picture or sing a song in that you're hoping that it moves somebody outside of their own way of thinking.
People say to me, 'You're a genius; you're great.' I don't know if I'll ever feel that way about myself. Some things, I feel like, are better left for other people to say, and I'm just not into, like, tooting my own horn or bragging or anything.
If the Holocaust that you talk about was real, why don't you allow the subject to be studied? One can freely research any issue, except for this issue, which is sealed. It is a black box, which they do not allow to be opened or reexamined. They do this in order to exploit it.
For us to feel peace within our hearts while we live here on earth we must be righteous. There is nothing that the world calls fun or pleasurable that can compare to the inner happiness and joy that comes from being righteous, nothing. That may be something you don't think much about, but if you will take time to identify how you feel when you make an unrighteous choice and compare that to how you feel when you make a difficult but righteous choice, you will know what I am talking about.
Whatever outrageous dream keeps flowing across your mind, allow it to live inside you. Don't deflect it, diminish it, invalidate it or come up with some excuse for why it can't happen. This will allow it to explain itself to you - why it's there, what it means, and what if anything you should do about it.
We still have slavery of all kinds - slavery of thought, slavery of ideas, slavery of cultureand I think 'Roots' exemplifies, in a very strong way, man's need to think for himself, feel for himself, do for himself.
I can only control what I can control at the end of the day, so some things you just can't allow to take your head the other way, some things happen for a reason.