ABIGAIL DISNEY

My advice to female directors is not to wait until you feel like your ideas have been pre-certified or until you think you've gotten some approval for them. Then it's too late! Follow your gut. That's hard to do, but the only way to be original.

I love everybody. I think my totem animal is a Labrador Retriever.

Combat is a piece of war. But war is a totalizing, uncivilized experience.

Film is the medium for communicating not just ideas, but things of the heart.

News reports don't look at the land that existed before a war and the land that exists after a war. Reporting on war is a snapshot in time.

I think if we understand better the impact of war on women and children, we might be more careful about the wars we start.

Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.

When you strengthen women, you strengthen the world.

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.

The fact is, funnily enough, that the people who seem to be most committed to causes also seem to be least invested in anyone actually talking to each other.

The greater good is achieved by not only telling people what they need to know, but also filling them with a sense of empathy and love.

There's no one on this earth taken less seriously in a leadership context than a young woman - everything is against you.

I was a bit of a lost lamb in my twenties, trying to find my higher calling.

I've heard people say in the U.N. community among mediators they don't like women as mediators because they're too quick to compromise.

We have a world minus a whole lot of talent that has stepped out of contention for leadership, only because they don't want to seem too aggressive, too smart, unattractive, or too male.

The hardest thing in the world, I now know, is to hold in your head that it is okay to think that you are right, but not to think so necessarily because everyone who disagrees with you is wrong or stupid or duped or bad.

When you make your first film at 47 and anybody but your mother goes to see it, to me, that's a miracle.

Once we got to know each other, we had such similar impulses. We saw in a similar way, and we developed a strong friendship. We would talk on the phone for hours, philosophically and theologically, about all of these issues.

It's powerfully important for me as a pro-choice person and person who supports Planned Parenthood to have Rob accept me as not a baby-killing horrible person. That's actually a massive step away from his original position, and he's taking a lot of heat in his world just for being my friend, just for hanging around with me.

I get very close to people when I'm shooting them.

My family achieved success not in spite of, but because of the American system of taxation. After all, without reliable and safe roads there’d have been no Disneyland; without high functioning legal systems and a well regulated business environment there would have been no copyright protection for Mickey Mouse.

There's a real difference between a documentary that was all about facts and history and information. People just don't get as engaged in that kind of documentary - they don't fall in love, they don't cry, they don't forget who they are, they don't ride with you. As we realized we had richer, vérité kind of people, what we wanted to do is focus in on the vérité story.

You can't worship the image or the Crucifix itself. You have to worship God.

I get very close to people when I'm shooting them. We would go and shoot a scene with Lucy, and I would spend the whole time telling her about Rob. Then I would go shoot a scene with Rob and tell him all about Lucy. Eventually they wanted to know each other. These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context. We brought to the garden at Rob's office and just sat and watched what unfolded. I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.

You probably couldn't have found much daylight between the NRA and the Disney company. They probably would've had had identical demographics for the people who really loved those companies.