Basically, I feel like people have always taken photos of themselves. When I was in college, I had these Polaroid cameras my friends and I would have so much fun with. Today, we'd be taking those pictures on our phones. I think it's just part of culture today... Why not have fun with it?
There's benefits of having established artists on the record, Liam Payne on 'Polaroid' for example. If you look at that song you have Lennon Stella, who's an up-and-coming artist, so there's a balance on there because I still want people to focus on the song just as much as Liam being an amazing superstar.
People aren't coming to me looking for political essays or polemic - they're looking for a rattling good story.
The revolution is that we can be anything. We don't have to be one thing or the other. The idea that it is my responsibility to represent only good black people... I mean, what are you talking about? That's not a character - that's a polemic.
Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.
All my films have some kind of statement about something - but I have to coat it with entertainment to make it palatable. Otherwise it becomes a polemic, and people don't want to see it. If you're trying to get a message out to people, you've got to entertain them at the same time.
If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles.
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
People call us heroes, but we are nothing compared to our police force and fire fighters and everybody who protects us and makes sure our freedom is held to the highest standard.
During the Umbrella Movement, the police force wasn't in control, and the police ignored the law and tried to use extreme force to hurt people.
A police force, wherever they are, is made up of amazing people, and I respect them a great deal.
Police forces collect information to be used in a public court to get people convicted. Security services gather information that does not necessarily lead to people being prosecuted and in many cases needs to remain confidential.
If a police officer is looking for a criminal, he or she might stop a number of people in that particular area and ask to see their driver's license. No one bellyaches about civil rights or privacy issues. We're just happy the cops are trying to find the bad guy.
I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.
Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.
Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.
I find that people want aggressive policing if they as a community feel they are part of it. They don't want aggressive policing if they feel it's being imposed upon them and they are a target.
Broken families not only affect the people involved, but they have an impact on public policy decisions in Washington, D.C., and state capitols around the nation.
I'm obviously aware that people are quite focused on the economy rather than foreign policy issues, but that is something that should and can be altered as people see the nature of the threats around the world that we face.
I believe that when it comes to major foreign policy issues, many prefer to have black people seen and not heard.
