I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.
Since I have introduced this term I had always a bad conscience. . . . I cannot help to feel it strongly and I am unable to believe that such an ugly thing should be realized in nature.
When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he must, at least for a time, feel himself to be any where but at home, amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning.
Somewhere in the dim recesses of the journalistic soul lies the horrible suspicion: This is really a pretty shallow and maybe unseemly way for a grownup to make a living.
We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart, in its cunning, quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it may deafen the clamor within.
Maybe you shouldn't be working as a jailer in Guantánamo. Maybe that's why you feel spiritually unhealthy.
I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.
I could see when I was filming '21' that it was going to go a direction I wasn't comfortable with it going.
I do write songs with a political dimension to them sometimes, but I'm always slightly appalled by it when I do.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
For me, as a Christian I will be uncomfortable because in all my teachings and all my learning, biblically, it's not right.
If you don't feel good about something, you don't shake it off easily.
I don't like a lot of things like [Iraq], I never did. Being in a position of celebrity and having your words carry such unnatural weight...I've always been a bit squeamish when it came to that kind of thing.
