Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.
Mo Yan is a writer who, defiantly in the face of those who wish his work were less cartoonish and more straightforward in its political meanings, continues to sing his own peculiar and alluring song.
I have found from experience that it is often interesting and useful to start from the edges and work inward - another flaw of mine. I seldom approach things directly. I would have made a great moth.
When Libya was in turmoil in 2011, the Chinese public was surprised to discover that more than thirty thousand of their countrymen were living there, most of them working on Chinese-run oil projects.
Hillary Clinton almost got to be president. The reasons why she didn't become president had to do with bad judgments about how to handle the early caucus states, which is not a gender-specific trait.
I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire. In the extremity of war, character is revealed.
Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'
How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.
This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
People are always surprised when they see me speak live that I have a sense of humor. And I say, Well, you know, there's not much opportunity to laugh when you're reporting the dread news of the day.
I find that those who voted for George W. Bush are less offended by his religious references, and those who voted for Bill Clinton did not seem offended at all when people prayed at his inauguration.
The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.
As a child, I was always very interested in music and had friends who were in the music business. I kind of accidentally fell into it and loved it. There was no reason not to - it was a great career.
In Britian we have a free press. It's not a pretty press, but it's free. The people who can't bear the Daily Mail, they say: 'you should ban it'. No, no, no, no, you don't ban it... you don't buy it.
People tend to throw up hands at Michael Jackson's multifarious bizarreness. But is it really so strange? The boy was forced to work by a cruel and physically abusive father starting at the age of 7.
A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others.
It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.
In the Tea Party era, it is the restless conservative Republican who has become passion's plaything, the toy of impetuous romance, an erotomania only intensified by the lusting for an upstart savior.
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine being an American icon! It would be pretty difficult to look at your face in the mirror and think of yourself as that without laughing and spitting toothpaste all over!
Bad restaurants find unique ways to be bad. Good ones are good in the same way: good food, nice staff, a pleasant room. The human capacity for finding unique ways to screw things up always amazes me.
Save for your goals. Take note of what's coming your way - vacations, the holidays, what ever is going to cost you money - and start saving ahead of time so that you have a stash when the time comes.
In sport, the money goes to the talent; it goes directly to the worker - unlike a bank, which sits in the middle of transactions and whose income bears no relation to any of the services it provides.
The CIO put up half a million dollars for Roosevelt's 1936 campaign and provided him with an immense group of active labor workers who played a large part in the sweeping victory he won at the polls.
The last thing reporters and editors want to be told is what to do and how to write. They don't want to be some politically correct, Orwellian, kind of like "you're telling me how to write about...?"
I'm not a minority: I'm a majority of one. We all are. To call someone a minority, you give them baggage, of not being full, or not being seen as full. All of us need to be seen as full human beings.
All I've ever done since I was 17 is tell stories. You know, I'm a storyteller. And that's what I'm going to keep on doing, especially now, kind of embracing and making sure that we tell immigration.
If all the actors are in the recording session at the same time, you can record all voices for one episode in an hour. Of course, the animation takes longer but the voice acting is done very quickly.
On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information.
If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.
Nobody ever asks men about the work-life balance, and I just find that interesting, because clearly, I would imagine most men also want to be good fathers, and I'm sure they want to be good partners.
Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.
I have this vision of maybe going the way of Bill Kurtis and, I think, Tom Brokaw, to a certain extent - the ability to not be tied to the desk anymore, but to do projects that are meaningful to you.
When an object or purpose is clearly held in thought, its precipitation, in tangible and visible form, is merely a question of time. The vision always precedes, and itself determines the realization.
Criminality being partially preordained may seem to let culprits off the hook. Yet it also makes the proclivity seem ineradicable and suggests that reform is unlikely: once a baddie, always a baddie.
There are so many kids in this world, and in this country, that need homes. And so we're perfectly content to look into adoption one day, if for some reason we aren't able to have a biological child.
In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, war and conflict stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering.
It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.
Senate races have tightened along with the presidential race. Watch to see how many Republican Senate candidates outperform Donald Trump - and how many hang on to their seats in states that he loses.
You have [Donald] Trump and [Ted] Cruz battling it out, and the moderate establishment candidates like Chris Christie or Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich - they have formed a circular firing squad.
On each side of the war against war, hopes soar, hopes dive, hour by hour now. Resignations abound, timetables slip, and the world waits, mesmerised. I'm off to Melbourne to record an arts chat show.
Whether that's speaking up in your job or asking for a promotion or saying, 'I think I can do that.' Using your voice in ways that might initially scare you. That can be being an architect of change.
I met Jason on a charity walk in 2001, and we got married on a friend's boat in Panama two years later. It was the perfect wedding for two people who'd already been married and who weren't teenagers.
Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.
Almost any government activity can also be seen as taking property 'without just compensation.' The basic model of an unconstitutional 'taking' would be if the government threw you out of your house.
For someone like me, making a documentary - I don't kid myself. There's no influence at all. What I do is entertainment. I would even say much the same about the column I write in 'The Sunday Times.'
What is it about trains that makes food taste so good? Some of my happiest memories are of prolonged lunches between St. Moritz and Zurich, Bordeaux and Paris, and even between Coimbra and Salamanca.
I'm not sure that Van Gogh got up in the morning and looked at the crows and the bizarre clouds and went damn that's a good painting, you know? No, he considered shooting himself, and one day he did.
The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.