Jeff MacNelly Quotes

I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.

It's difficult to have any animosity towards someone if you recognize that on so many levels they're exactly the same as you.

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

We are all human and I want to relate that message to all people.

Everyone can relate to me no matter what race or who you are or how you feeling.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

When you are in someone's home, in their bed, you see the world from their eyes. You understand 'the other' is not so other.

You can't have empathy for somebody that's gone through something you haven't - because, definitionally, you can't. But you can feel for them and have sympathy for them. And that's what this country needs to practice more. It's about realizing that you do come from a different place.

We're all people at the end of the day.

I think our music is more about seeing ourselves in each other and trying to find a more humanistic viewpoint for the world.

Don't look down on them for looking down on us. Look at them, instead, as friends we don't know yet and who don't yet know what they are missing in not knowing us.

Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them. If you allow yourself to be somewhat curious - and if you get into the habit of doing that - it's the first step to being open minded and realizing that your points of view aren't totally opposite.

You have to walk in the other guy's moccasins. You have to think what they think. If you want to bring somebody onto your side, you have to figure out what motivates them. What do they need?

Everybody's funny if you love them.

It is easier to speak to those who have had similar experiences than to those who are as yet ignorant.

All of us are much more human than otherwise.

Progress and healing involves seeing every person as not so different from ourselves.

There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.

You know, we have our differences, everybody does, honest, real differences, but I do believe strongly that we as neighbors are drawn together far more than we're driven apart.

If we could all just laugh at ourselves, in hard times or good times, it would be an incredible world.

I think if people who are attacking me or against me, if they would just watch one of my films, they would - they may not agree with me politically on all the things I'm saying. But they will know at the end of the film that I love this country and that I have a heart. And they'll have a good laugh throughout the film.

I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

Try to love someone who you want to hate, because they are just like you, somewhere inside, in a way you may never expect, in a way that resounds so deeply within you that you cannot believe it.

I don't need to have my convictions confirmed by a show of numbers. However, being among people in front of a band leads me to believe that all is not lost, that humans, now and then, can communicate on a higher level than the political and the practical.