Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Rather than fretting about IQ scores, voters should try to determine what candidates read - other than the Bible, which they all say they read - and the kind of people with whom they spend their time.
Spend hundreds of millions; talk endlessly about issues; present 12-point plans for education, the economy, and the environment. But in the end, the election of our next president can turn on a gaffe.
I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.
An object imbued with intent — it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it. An object devoid of intent — it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away.
An object imbued with intent - it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it. An object devoid of intent - it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away.
I keep telling myself to calm down, to take less of an interest in things and not to get so excited, but I still care a lot about liberty, freedom of speech and expression, and fairness in journalism.
Let's pretend there's a pandemic. Let's everybody run around and play your role. Main result is that there is tremendous confusion. ... Nobody knows who's in charge. Nobody knows the chain of command.
Media literacy is not just important, it's absolutely critical. It's going to make the difference between whether kids are a tool of the mass media or whether the mass media is a tool for kids to use.
Golf is not a good walk spoiled. It is becoming a good walk prohibited. Show me the common sense in this and I promise I will relent. But there is no common sense at all in the prohibition of walking.
If you hit a Talib, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty. You must fight others through peace and through dialogue and through education.
When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.
I hate government. I hate power. I think that man's existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.
I'm banking on the fact that there are still good people in government who will prevent this. I've been a journalist for more than 33 years, and at Rappler we refuse to change, I refuse to be bullied.
Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.
Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth about the sexual revolution is that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm in the life of women.
Honestly we never lied to people about who we were. Usually the wackier interviews came to pass because the interview subjects, aware that we were Comedy Central, just wanted to get their stories out.
When I come home, I need to feel instantly disconnected. In the rest of my life, I feel overstimulated. Here, I want things to be serene and unfussy, full of objects I love - but not too many of them.
Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.
When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.
Let's face it: part of being a grownup is that every day you have to choose between going out at night or staying home, and it is one of life's unhappy truths that there is not enough time to do both.
One of the great things about movies is that it's just that short period of time. It's a bubble. The last thing you want to know is that Elizabeth and Darcy had a fight over how to treat the servants!
Man is more miserable, more restless and unsatisfied than ever before, simply because half his nature--the spiritual--is starving for true food, and the other half--the material--is fed with bad food.
The goal is to be both disciplined and loose, so that the writing does not turn into a task or a chore. To leave myself behind, along with the mechanics, and disappear into the lives of my characters.
I was with the mujaheddin, the rebels, and they were fighting against the Russians, and they would bring me along. Some of the adventures, when I look back at them now, it's a wonder I'm still around.
The modern spirit is a hesitant one. Spontaneity has given way to cautious legalisms, and the age of heroes has been superseded by a cult of specialization. We have no more giants; only obedient ants.
If you're going to believe in God, if you're going to take that leap of faith, as I do, then the God that seems the most comprehensible to me would be the God who set us spinning and said 'Good luck.'
Barack Obama may have found the answer to his biggest rhetorical challenge: When millions of voters are unemployed or underemployed, how does a president simultaneously sound realistic and optimistic?
[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.
I so much like real things - the realities that come naturally from the depths of us like - what shall I say? - the way trees grow, from some inner essential principle of them, just expressing itself.
People who suffer from anxiety are very good at hiding it. That can often be a contributor to the anxiety because the gap between the internal perception and the external impression can feel so large.
My life, like most people's, has been negatively affected by cancer, and the thought of my young children living in an age where this is no longer humanity's No. 1 health fear was simply overpowering.
I can never resist Ruritanian intrigue: I was once charged with the task of offering the Estonian throne to Prince Edward. Feeling like a Dumas Musketeer on a mission, I did so, but he turned it down.
Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules.
Only 4 percent of the people who live here [Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania] are actually foreign-born. And even fewer of those are refugees. So there's not a whole lot of experience with refugees here.
Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.
It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.
You can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on.
This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.
Only if you give the Palestinians something to lose is there a hope that they will agree to moderate their demands.... I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands.
There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let's stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.
Believe women first. I think this is very important. We must believe women first, and if the evidence truly stacks against them - in a significant way, not just a minor way - then revise our position.
We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.
There is an indescribable something that ties us to life. For this purpose, it is not necessary that we should be happy. Though our life be almost without enjoyment, we do not consent to part with it.
Everybody says women are like water. I think it's because water is the source of life, and it adapts itself to its environment. Like women, water also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life.
My immune system has always been overly welcoming of germs. It's far too polite, the biological equivalent of a southern hostess inviting y'all nice microbes to stay awhile and have some artichoke dip.
If a boxer ever went as crazy as Nijinsky all the wowsers in the world would be screaming 'punch-drunk.' Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn't there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs
ADMIRABLY BOLD. There's something grand about the film's sincerity and the intensity of its emotions and something fresh and bold about the way director Gray uses the conventions of romantic melodrama.
In one hotel, the maid who built the fire fainted in our room. Exhaustion was the cause. We talked with her later and learned that she worked 17 hours a day and makes 95 marks a month - about 50 cents.
Flowing water is at once a picture and a music, which causes to flow at the same time from my brain, like a limpid and murmuring rivulet, sweet thoughts, charming reveries, and melancholy remembrances.
SCRAP-BOOK, n. A book that is commonly edited by a fool. Many persons of some small distinction compile scrap-books containing whatever they happen to read about themselves or employ others to collect.