In the end, the thing that's important about free expression is that it's the right from which all other rights are derived. If you can't articulate ideas and if you can't articulate critiques of other peoples' ideas, then you're powerless. What always increases the power of an authoritarian regime is whether it can successfully prevent people from expressing themselves.
Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear.
If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
At one point in my life, I was very involved with social causes. I'm still involved, but now I have a family and it's important to me.
When it is important for you to say something and you find a vehicle to say it, then go for it. It is so rare when that happens so I think every minute spent fighting for it is always worth it. Even if nothing ends up happening, it's still worth the fight.
Silence is deeply important in all of our lives.
The important is not what you believe but how you behave.
Women tend to live longer than men do. Women tend to have, unfortunately, their salaries peaked sooner than men's do. Both of these things are extraordinarily important in putting together financial and investing plans for women.
For me, language and how I use it are very important. I held back on doing a poetry book, walking the fine line between trying to be helpful and just putting more junk out there.
Everybody gets hurt. Sometimes a big hurt, sometimes a little hurt. But the person who's suffered a lot isn't especially strong. And the person who's been hurt a little isn't especially weak. What's important is being able to get over it.
I think it's important to understand Shari'a to be rooted in history - what we know about the history and what we don't know about the history. So then, if people want to argue, at least they're arguing from the same point and we know what we know, and we know what we don't know.
I was a teenager when General Zia took power in the Pakistan; I was in my twenties when I went there during the late 1980s and I saw then not only the novel punishments that he was introducing - because they were novel, and this is again something that's very important to understand, it's only in the last thirty, forty years, since 1979 in fact, that these penalties have been revived anywhere in the world apart from Saudi Arabia.
When scoring a film, empathy is the key. And it is just as important to use music to express the actors' emotions as it is to move the audience.
When I meet thousands of fans of the comic - when I realize every one of them can recite the Lantern Corps oath ('In Brightest Day, in blackest night...') - I know how important this is to people.
I know there are actors we all want to beat up a little. I think it's important to do whatever it takes, and whatever it takes sometimes involves some physical or mental discipline. There's a lot at stake.
It's just a moment that doesn't feel 100-percent truthful, a kind of a square peg/round hole situation. Which is why the preproduction on a movie is so important, because you can't just push those through.
A well-tailored suit is important - and I don't like wearing belts with mine - it should be tailored to your body.
It was more important to me to understand what its like to be this Jewish kid who felt he was so different at such a young age. I feel the story is about a kid who came to hate through love, so I felt I had to learn why he loved this thing so much that he also apparently hated it.
I think it's always really important for people to feel like they can connect with you.
Struggle is actually something that is important to the process of understanding what true happiness is.
Not to discount my music, but I'm always suspicious of the music that I make on some level, as to how valid it is. Or maybe not "valid," but how important.
The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.
There is nothing unimportant in the universe.
