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Published On: Thu, Apr 19th, 2018

Sean Penn Quotes

I think, we’re in a sad state where fiction is attributed to opinion … where fiction can’t be just read as it is. – April 2018 Rolling Stone, promoting Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff

On sympathizing with Bob, a Killer: I don’t know about conscious sympathizing. I think that there were aspects of this character that have, even within the style of the piece, a kind of moral compass. Obviously there are … to use the word moral is in contradiction to some of the choices that he makes and some of his activities. But anybody that has a clear view of anything in a chaotic society is going to be up against it and that would give me empathy for them. April 2018 Rolling Stone, promoting Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff

America’s a complex place that’s doing all it can to be without any complexity at all. April 2018 Rolling Stone, promoting Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff

The greatest thing that an actor can bring to the party is to play well with others. It’s the collaboration. I increasingly don’t play well with others. – March, 2018 on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

While promoting his new film, The Gunman, Sean Penn didn’t miss a chance to voice his political opinions, talking about ISIS, the beheading videos and doubling down on the blame for the Middle East chaos.

“These are the guys, he and President Bush and some others, who invented Daesh, or ISIS,” Penn said on TBS’s Conan, Marck 2015.

“I mean, they really are that which created it, and so I wanted to give him a shout-out,” he added of Cheney. “Thanks for that.”

Penn also called Cheney an “embittered bacteria of humanity” and wondered how the vice president, who has struggled with heart disease, is still alive.

“It’s always a surprise to me to remember that, through bionic technology and so on, this guy’s still here.”

“We have people like Harvey Milk, who were beautiful, brilliant, impactful guys, and, you know — it’s just no good deed goes unpunished, and then you’ve got the Cheneys. This is just me musing.”

Penn thinks the media is not doing enough to cover the violence.

“The problem is we are not seeing enough of real violence. We are being anesthetized when you don’t see the horror of war,” Penn said to the Daily Telegraph.

“Anyone who sees them [ISIS videos] and claims that they were anaesthetized by violent movies, that they weren’t horrified by what they saw, on the most primal level, is intellectually dishonest or existentially unpresent.”


Sean Penn takes on the Tea Party: October 2011

“…there’s another problem. You have what I call ‘the get the N-word out of the White House party,’ the Tea Party” – Penn tells CNN’s Piers Morgan

“If you ask a representative of the Tea Party, ‘OK Social Security, socialist. Get rid of it?’ They’re going to get very confused,” Penn tells CNN’s Piers Morgan. “At the end of the day, there’s a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, you know, can we just lynch him?”

Because every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should…truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies. – regarding Hugo Chavez on Bill Maher’s HBO show March 10, 2010

I don`t consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that fall into politics are human concerns. – January 9, 2005 boston.com interview

I truly think the man should be imprisoned for the rest of his life. I know that sounds like some lefty thing, but I think the state of accountability is a sham. – Rolling Stone Interview February 6, 2009

All of that footage — how long was it, seven plus minutes (when Bush sat in the classroom)? … That’s who George Bush is. I think it speaks very specifically to something that not everybody has. Forget politics, forget Republican, right, left. But it speaks to his unfitness to lead anything. – regarding Bush’s delay during 9/11 crisis as shown in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

Well, I think that they’re professionally naive journalists. I have no regard for 90 percent of American journalism. That’s why I travel and look for things for myself. If you’re going to get on Cuba for its lack of free press, well, we don’t have any press, as far as I’m concerned. We supposedly have the right to it. But we don’t fulfill it. – Rolling Stone Interview February 6, 2009

Yeah, I am. I’m optimistic about this man, not about him by himself, and not about his Cabinet. But I’m optimistic about the people who put him in office — if they support him first but then challenge him. – on Penn feeling obtimistic over Obama, Rolling Stone Interview February 6, 2009

RS Q: Do you have any regrets about not challenging Raúl Castro more during your visit on things like the historic repression of gays in Cuba?
I wasn’t intending to paint the whole picture. I was talking about the United States and our gullibility. Just a few weeks ago, I was doing a reading for Paul Newman’s foundation, and we had people outside with “Matthew Shepard, burn in hell” signs. We’ve got a few closet-cleaning numbers to do before we start attacking them. – Rolling Stone Interview February 6, 2009

NEXT RSQ: This is still a homophobic country, no doubt, but it’s different from the history of what happened to gays in Cuba.
But we also lynched blacks all over the South at one time. Did they have massive oppression of homosexuals in Cuba? At one time, yeah. But things change. I’m not a defender of Cuba. But you have to consider the lens you’re looking through. – Rolling Stone Interview February 6, 2009

It’s one of my biggest problems with Barack Obama. When Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, a lot of people were upset about it, but then when Ford died, these Democrats who’d once criticized Ford for that pardon suddenly had these revisionist opinions: “We needed to be unified.” But long term, do you think Bush and Cheney would have gone to the trough like they did if Nixon had gone to jail? No. So when Barack Obama came out militantly opposed not only to impeachment but censuring, I thought, “What the fuck is that for accountability?” Yes, I do think that Obama is a deeply elegant, bright, human person who gives a shit and can do it, who can actually help change the world. But I don’t know yet if all of us are going to do our part. – Rolling Stone Interview February 6, 2009

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I think it`s really important to be able to feel your own life, and I had felt so numbed by what had been a kind of surreal saturation of what was going on in the Middle East and what it was going to mean, particularly relative to my kids` future and thin…

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About the Author

- Writer and Co-Founder of The Global Dispatch, Brandon has been covering news, offering commentary for years, beginning professionally in 2003 on Crazed Fanboy before expanding into other blogs and sites. Appearing on several radio shows, Brandon has hosted Dispatch Radio, written his first novel (The Rise of the Templar) and completed the three years Global University program in Ministerial Studies to be a pastor. To Contact Brandon email [email protected] ATTN: BRANDON

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