Wall Street, the banks, and corporate America, has been able to call the shots here. They control our members of Congress and they get what they want.
Back in the '80s and '90s, when GM was consistently posting giant profits, they were simultaneously firing tens of thousands of workers in my hometown of Flint and across Michigan.
Bush's presidency is revisionism-proof. We're going to be recovering from it for the rest of our lives.
Most liberals I know were for invading Afghanistan right after 9/11.
We as Americans believe it's OK to kill people. We believe it's OK to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We think it's OK to invade a country where we think Osama Bin Laden is and he's in the other country. So we just go in and we just kill. And we have the death penalty; we sanction it.
How do you deliver democracy to a country? You don't do it down the barrel of a gun. That's not how you deliver it.
I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world.
Listen friends, you have to face the truth: You are never going to be rich... The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever.
Oprah's got good politics, she's got a good heart, and she'll have us all up Jazzercising at six in the morning. This cannot be a bad thing, and reading a book while we're Jazzercising. So America would be better off if Oprah were president.
What I'm asking for is a new economic order. I don't know how to construct that; I'm not an economist.
There's not democracy in the workplace. I mean, through most of our daily lives, the idea of democracy is fairly nonexistent. And I think things work better when the people who have to work with whatever it is we're working with have a say in how it's working.
I - honestly, I don't know of a worse lie one could tell other than a lie to take a country to war. To make up things to take people to war. That's just got to be the most obscene, immoral thing to do.
I'm very blessed and fortunate that people want to go see my movies.
Before there were unions, there was no middle class.
This life is a gift, and to reject that gift or abuse that gift is not human and not worthy of us.
If you reduce the guns and the ammo, you'll reduce the murders.
You need to have a relationship with what you put inside you. I don't want to get all spiritual about this, but I believe our bodies are a gift, and to deface it is disrespectful.
The money to fund great things and innovations and programs is gone in our lifetime; it's all gone to debt. So we won't be able to solve global warming or have the transportation that we needed for the 21st century. We should be supporting people with great ideas, but it's gone, and now it's gotta be paid back with interest to banks in China.
I don't believe that the Bush Administration had something to do with September 11th. I do believe that there were a lot of warning signals, but I don't think they were ignored on purpose - Bush just wanted to go to the ranch for a month.
If I were a capitalist I would not give my employees health insurance with no deductible, which I do, including dental, and paid pregnancy leave. That's not called capitalism, that's called being a Christian and someone who believes in democracy, so that everyone should get a fair slice of the pie.
The health insurance industry does not like to pay out claims, because they don't make money. The only way they can make a profit is if they don't pay for your operation. If they pay for your operation and your doctor's appointment and your pharmaceuticals, they don't make any money.
This is the crux of the problem: because the Republicans and the right wing have been successful in almost eliminating unions, everyone else has suffered as a result.
I'd feel bad if I had you come into a theater and you leave feeling ripped off.
My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.
How could a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, have... plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets?
The products built in the factories of G.M., Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps.
What really went wrong is that General Motors has had this philosophy from the beginning that what's good for General Motors is good for the country. So, their attitude was, 'We'll build it and you buy it. We'll tell you what to buy. You just buy it.'
My films don't have instant impact because they're dense with ideas that people have not thought about. It takes a while for the American public to wrap its head around some of the things I'm saying.
If your bank took bailout money, take your money out of that bank and put it in a credit union. Credit unions are owned by the people who have their money in the credit union.
I'm used to my films having little effect on making the world a better place.
All religions teach the same basic thing, that you have to stand up for those that are considered the worst.
Part of my job is to read the paper, watch C-Span and show things that haven't been shown or were buried.
I've always been sort of confused by the trajectory my life has taken. I was supposed to be on an assembly line building Buicks.
The No. 1 cause of bankruptcies is medical bills.
There's been almost a dozen films that have been made against me. There's actually more films made attacking me than films I've made.
You can't regulate child labor. You can't regulate slavery. Some things are just wrong.