Natalie Portman [1] made a rare red carpet appearance when she attended a UCLA gala in LA on Tuesday. The actress posed for photos with Younes and Soraya Nazarian, the founders of the Center For Israel Studies, and gave a heartfelt speech to the crowd inside the event while honoring Amos Oz, an Israeli author and journalist whose 2002 memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, has been turned into a movie; Natalie directed the big-screen adaptation and will be premiering the film at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. The Academy Award winner and Harvard grad opened up about her directorial debut in the most recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter [2] and also had lots of insightful, intelligent, and poised musings about the Israeli government, the culture in her adopted home of Paris (she relocated to the city with her husband, French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, and their 3-year-old son, Aleph), and Hollywood's "worship" of awards — she even admitted to not knowing where her own Oscar statue is, saying, "I haven't seen it in a while." Keep reading for eight quotes from Natalie Portman that will remind you just how great of a role model she is.

• On her Academy Award, which she won in 2011 for Black Swan: "I don't know where it is; I think it's in the safe or something. I don't know. I haven't seen it in a while. I mean, Darren [Aronofsky] actually said to me something when we were in that whole thing that resonated so deeply. I was reading the story of Abraham to my child and talking about, like, not worshipping false idols. And this is literally like gold men. This is lit­er­ally worshipping gold idols — if you worship it. That's why it's not displayed on the wall. It's a false idol."
• On continuing to work with Dior after John Galliano's anti-Semitic rant: "I don't see why not to be forgiving to someone who is, I mean, someone who's trying to change. However, I don't think those comments are ever OK. I don't forgive the comments, but . . . we've all done things that we regret."
• On life with her husband, Benjamin Millepied: "The disappointments are always in myself, and like, when you're faced day to day with someone looking at you, it's like a mirror that you have to yourself, and you can see your own good behavior and bad behavior. And it's a beautiful challenge to be the best person in the mirror that you can be. I mean, I don't beat myself up over it, but I'm not always as generous as I feel like I could be."

• On living in Paris: "I've been to Paris so much in my life that I felt [at first] like it's very similar, and then when you live in a place, you start realizing how culturally different we are, deeply culturally different. I feel like this country has a lot of religion and a lot of freedom around that; and there, the religion is almost like love. Love and intellectualism is their sort of way."
• On Parisian culture: "I love that people at dinner want to have a serious conversation — and only a serious conversation. They'll be upset if you don't have something interesting happen. I love that my kid wants to go to art museums after school — like, 'Take me to the Pompidou.' I love that it's also not elitist, as it is in New York. You can afford to go to the philharmonic or the opera much more easily because all of it's subsidized. And there's a huge culture of cinema there."

• On the Charlie Hebdo attacks [3] in Paris: "I went to visit a school that we actually helped build with Dior that was an all-girls school in Kenya, like the first girls' secondary school in the area. Someone I was with was looking at the news and said, 'Oh my God! There were just attacks in Paris.'"
• On being Jewish in Paris: "Listen. I'm from Israel. Yes [I'm nervous], but I'd feel nervous being a black man in [the United States]. I'd feel nervous being a Muslim in many places."
• On Benjamin Netanyahu, the newly reelected prime minister of Israel: "I'm very much against Netanyahu. Against. I am very, very upset and disappointed that he was re-elected. I find his racist comments horrific. However, I don't — what I want to make sure is, I don't want to use my platform [the wrong way]. I feel like there's some people who become prominent, and then it's out in the foreign press. You know, sh*t on Israel. I do not. I don't want to do that."