I … thought about all the artists that I really respected and liked. T — Björk

"The thing about making [Dancer in the Dark] that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I cant take it, because Im pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said, What did you expect? All major directors are sexist; a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female–male equality. My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick, and still they are the one[s] that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Triers case it is not so, and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming, and hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up [so] that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this soul-robbery. Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that."

"Its interesting for me to bring up a girl. You go to the toy store and the female characters there—Cinderella, the lady in Beauty and the Beast—their major task is to find Prince Charming. And Im like, wait a minute, its 2005! Weve fought so hard to have a say, and not just live through our partners, and yet youre still seeing two-year-old girls with this message pushed at them that the only important thing is to find this amazing dress so that the guy will want you. Its something my mum pointed out to me when I was little—so much [so] that I almost threw up; but, shes right."

"Emotional landscapes They puzzle me The riddle gets solved and you push me up to This state of emergency How beautiful to be State of emergency Is where I want to be"

"But, but, these are the people that made the Busby Berkeley movies, yeah? So theyre not exactly subtle."

"Its so amazing when people tell me that … electronic music has not got soul. And they blame the computers. They got the finger pointed at the computers like, "Theres no soul here." … You cant blame the computer. If theres not soul in the music, its because nobody put it there. And its not the tools fault."

"Youll be given love Youll be taken care of Youll be given love You have to trust it"

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs."

"The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it."

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."

"I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."