“No world lacks its villains so self-confident that they don’t believe they can get the best end of a bargain with the darkness.”

Australia Day Address, 25 January 2006

The Mission Song (2006)

Source: Article in The Daily Herald (14 December 1945), quoted in Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot (1994), p. 141

The Paris Review interview (1994)
Context: I was performing The Sea Lion in the Newport Performing Arts Center. Afterwards a white-haired old woman approached me and said, Hey, you remember me? I looked her over, and I knew I remembered her, but had no idea who she was. She said, Lois. It still didn’t click. She said, Lois Learned, Big Nurse, and I thought, Oh my God. She was a volunteer at Newport, long since retired from the nursing business. This was the nurse on the ward I worked on at the Menlo Park hospital. I didn’t know what to think and she didn’t either, but I was glad she came up to me. I felt there was a lesson in it, the same one I had tried to teach Hollywood. She’s not the villain. She might be the minion of the villain, but she’s really just a big old tough ex-army nurse who is trying to do the best she can according to the rules that she has been given. She worked for the villain and believed in the villain, but she ain’t the villain.

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185
On Barack Obama

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