Forest Whitaker

“It's abhorrent to me that somebody is just evil, and you can't explain it.”

“It rests in the hands of the common person as well as those with the power to shape humanity's course toward a world where every child, woman and man's most basic needs are met.”

“It's important for youth, black youths particularly, to be able to fill in the blanks of themselves so they can know completely who they are, but also all the country to understand what this...”

“Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it's not completely an art form. In painting, you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick, or whatever. In sculpture, you...”

“You have to ask if the country would have been ready for Barack Obama if we hadn't been prepared by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. If they hadn't already been in positions of enormous po...”

“Our leaders must hear us speaking on behalf of our brothers and sisters in South Sudan. If the moral duty to save lives and work toward peace is not compelling enough to drive decision-maker...”

“I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every do...”

“When I was a kid, the only way I saw movies was from the back seat of my family's car at the drive-in.”

“You try to pull away the experiences until you get to the core of humanity, and you find that light that exists in everybody. It's that light that I'm searching for in all of my work - is th...”

“To try and act like we haven't had great progress is not true. Obama didn't fail - he changed the psyche of the nation and, in some ways, the world.”

“My eye? It's a genetic thing. My dad had it, and now I have it. You know, I just found out that it may be correctable a little bit, because it does impair my vision. When I look up, I lose s...”

“I was a curious child. I'd debate with anyone who came to the door - people from the Islamic community... Jehovah's Witnesses... anyone.”

“I can play a man who's despicable. But I'll still look inside him to find a point of connection. If I can find that kernel, audiences will relate to me.”

“There's a molecule inside of you that is connected to everything - every person, every energy, every thing. You look for it, and when you find it, then you allow it to magnify and grow and b...”

“I've been fortunate, I guess: I've gotten to play a lot of very diverse roles for quite a long time. But in the beginning, I was thinking, 'I'm not gonna do certain characters. I will be wil...”

“When we talk about the issue of child soldiers, it can be easy to focus just on ending recruitment and liberating those boys and girls who are currently being held in military camps. Obvious...”

“I fell through a stage once. I was doing a truly African dance, and all of a sudden, I hit the ground with my foot and went straight through the stage. I guess they didn't have much money, s...”

“I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers - smart, k...”

“I stay true because whatever the project is, I'm still looking for inside of that character. It's the thing that connects him to me and to everybody else. So, the search is the same. It's to...”