Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Africans believe in something that is difficult to render in English. We call it ubuntu, botho. It means the essence of being human. You know when it is there and when it is absent. It speaks about humaneness, gentleness, hospitality, putting yourself out on behalf of others, being vulnerable. It embraces compassion and toughness. It recognizes that my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
There is no reason to believe ... that the "essential purpose" of language is "communication". Language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: to establish relations among people, to express or clarify thought, for play, for creative mental activity, to gain understanding, and so on. In my opinion, there is no reason to accord privileged status to one or the other of these modes.
The First Amendment...does not say that in every respect there shall be a separation of Church and State....Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other - hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly....The state may not establish a 'religion of secularism' in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.
In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.
After what seemed like an eternity, we finally reached the summit just as the sun was rising. I couldn't believe that we had actually done it. We were standing at the highest point in all of Africa, looking down at the clouds below us, with the sun directly in front of us, its rays welcoming us to the beginning of a new day. It didn't seem like this was something that humans were meant to experience, yet here we were
That's all global warming ever was. For the scientists involved in it, it was a living. You go out and promote what the leftists wanted to hear, and you got grant money. And if you run around and really sound like you believe it, then they're gonna make you a star. And if you're Algore and you realize you can capitalize on your vice presidency, you can become a multimillionaire spreading this hoax, which he has done.
Most of the people I've been fortunate enough to work with all share the same passion for creativity, for ingenuity, for playing make-believe and really just having fun. It doesn't matter if we're blowing up cars, or shooting an emotional scene in a police station, deep inside we all know our imaginations are at work, and our imaginations are manifesting into reality - at least momentarily for the cameras to capture.
Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago.
I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money. I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue.
My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support - which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection - but also by taking active steps to end the baby's life swiftly and humanely.
If you believe [Steven Lerner] is being honest about what he believes - and I do - it's a fascinating look into the mind-set of the kook, extremist left in this country who are treated sympathetically by the media. Their causes are all just, and so is the notion that capitalism is unfair and that their money has been stolen from them and that the country is unjust - and they need to, you know, economically hobble it.
I originated a remark many years ago that I think has been copied more than any little thing that I've ever said, and I used it in the follies of 1922. I said America has a unique record. We never lost a war and we never won a conference in our lives. I believe that we could without any degree of egotism, single-handed lick any nation in the world. But we can't confer with Costa Rica and come home with our shirts on.
When I was in my routine training for the Israeli army as a teenager, they discovered completely by chance that I was a lethal sniper. I could hit the target smack in the center further away than anyone could believe. Not just that, even though I was tiny and not even much of an athlete, I was incredibly accurate throwing hand grenades too. Even today I can load a Sten automatic rifle in a single minute, blindfolded.
I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively andnonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.
We will be able to depart this life with the quiet peace-giving notion, that we were permitted to contribute to the happiness of many who will live after us. In our long lives we endeavored to unfold the collective consciousness. In our lives we have known hell and heaven; the final balance, however, is that we helped pave the way to dynamic harmony in this earthly house. That, I believe, is the meaning of this live.
Why does one want to walk wings? Why force one's body from a plane to make a parachute jump? Why should man want to fly at all? People often ask these questions. But what civilization was not founded on adventure, and how long could one exist without it? Some answer the attainment of knowledge. Some say wealth, or power, is sufficient cause. I believe the risks I take are justified y the sheer love of the life I lead.
The United States remains the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all of our people. And yet we are spending almost twice as much per capita. We have a massively dysfunctional health care system. And I do believe in a Medicare for all single-payer system, whether a small state like Vermont can lead the nation, which I certainly hope we will, or whether it's California or some other state.
The New York Times is filled with Ivy League graduates and so is the Washington Post. I mean, it's all the same club. They may be Ivy League educated, but they're not smart. Their minds are closed. They actually are mind-numbed robots. They have been programmed all their lives. They're not even thinkers. These are people who have been programmed to believe what they believe. They are committed believers, not thinkers.
Reality (i.e., the truth) is that there is a God in heaven. Reality is that He made us and we are accountable to Him. Reality is that this God has spoken and what He says matters--eternally. Reality is that without His salvation, we are doomed to eternal torment. Reality is that God's Son, Jesus Christ, has died for the sins of the world, that He has risen again, and that whoever believes on Him is given eternal life.
I've begun to believe more and more that movies are all about transitions, that the key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes. And not just how you get from one scene to the next, but where you leave a scene and where you come into a new scene. Those are some of the most important decisions that you make. It can be the difference between a movie that works and a movie that doesn't.
We must create the conditions for immigrants to normally integrate into our society, learn Russian and, of course, respect our culture and traditions and abide by Russian law. In this regard, I believe that the decision to make learning the Russian language compulsory and administer exams is well grounded. To do so, we will need to carry out major organisational work and introduce corresponding legislative amendments.
Essentially, not only do we believe in this myth of 'de-risking', but it has become the one overriding goal; de-risking above growth, de-risking above innovation, de-risking above everything else. And we've reached the point where the Fed is using $70 Billion a month to 'de-risk' a largely insolvent banking system. And this can only end badly. The idea that you can do capitalism without risk is ridiculous on its face.
He held her gaze steady while he summarized her promises. “She will honor me, protect me, obey me only when she believes I’m being reasonable—but I shouldn’t hold out hope that that day will ever come—try to love me before she’s an old woman, and I’d better get it straight in my mind that she will respect me until or unless I do something to prove I’m not worthy, and God save me then. Have I left anything out, Brenna?
You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it?
With all the conceptual truths in the universe at His disposal [Jesus] did not give them something to think about together when He was gone. Instead, He gave them concrete things to do - specific ways of being together in their bodies - that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when He was no longer around to teach them Himself ... "Do this" He said - not believe this but do this - "in remembrance of me.
We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.
We did not choose to believe that personal choice is the highest human virtue. Rather, we were taught, formed, forced to believe nothing is important in life other than that which we have personally chosen. The irony is that the belief that nothing is important in life other than that which we have personally chosen is a belief that we have not personally chosen! The supermarket and shopping mall have been our school.
I remember reading Dave Barry for the first time and being like oh my God I can't believe you can do this. Watching Mel Brooks and Monty Python and SNL and all that stuff really informed me as a writer and then at high school I started a satire magazine and the college like The Lampoon really introduced me to like you know a lot of very like-minded people who really wanted to like comedy was the center of their lives.
Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)
I focus on faculty, as opposed to facilities, budgets, endowments or students. I do so because I believe, based on many decades of work as a teacher, a scholar and an administrator, that the quality of the faculty determines the quality of the university. Everything else flows from the quality of the faculty. If the faculty are good, you will attract good students and you will have alumni who will raise funds for you.
Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.
I strongly believe that marriage should be defined as between a man and a woman. I'm troubled by activist judges who are defining marriage. I've watched carefully what's happened in San Francisco where licenses were being issued, even though the law states otherwise. I have consistently stated that I will support law to protect marriage between a man and a woman. And obviously these events are influencing my decision.
It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times.
I use throughout the term 'liberal' in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that 'liberal' has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.
Well, equity matters. I hope that most of us believe that we actually would all benefit from living in a more equitable society. If that's not happening, we're squandering human potential. We want to make the best television possible. We should be drawing on the entire available pool of storytellers and directors, and we should be expanding that pool and trying to hire the very, very, very best people. That's our job.
I do believe that one of the major ways that we're out of alignment with our souls is in our disconnect from nature. I feel that we have kind of lost our natural way of being connected to the planet. We need to be rooted on the planet. We experience ourselves as kind of isolated from that, and I actually think that's a great cause of the suffering that many of us are experiencing, whether consciously or unconsciously.
I have never concealed the fact and said it before the court in 1938 that I came from an anti-Semitic past and tradition... I ask only that you look at my life historically and take it as history. I believe that from 1933 I truly represented the Lutheran-Christian outlook on the Jewish question - as I revealed before the court - but that I returned home after eight years' imprisonment as a completely different person.
You should go." "I can't." "Because you want to stare at the monster?" Alec's green eyes blaze, but with a wholly human fire now. "Or because you pity me?" I couldn't guess which possibility he loathes more. I fold my arms. "I can't leave because the door's locked. Believe me, I would've gone hours ago if I could have." "Oh. Of course." Then he looks so abashed--so boyish, and so handsome--that I almost want to laugh.
Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: ‘How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty . . . how could she kill herself?’ Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can’t believe that life wasn’t important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere
I believe it is no wrong Observation, that Persons of Genius, and those who are most capable of Art, are always fond of Nature, as such are chiefly sensible, that all Art consists in the Imitation and Study of Nature. On the contrary, People of the common Level of Understanding are principally delighted with the Little Niceties and Fantastical Operations of Art, and constantly think that finest which is least Natural.
There's always a new thing happening to me that's even more extraordinary, so pressure gets harder. But I like it when it's hard. Anyone can do it when it's easy. When it's hard and you can do it good, you're proud of yourself. There's going to be more pressure as the years go by, that's for sure. But I think I'm a hard worker and I'm ready for that. As long as I believe in what I'm doing, the pressure is okay with me.
We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research--and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's--shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line.
Do you know that all of the money that we are spending, that the government is spending, must come from you? The government has no great pile of gold to which it can go to get what it gives you. The government has not one cent that it does not take from your pockets. Do not imagine, do not believe, do not go on the theory that you are not to pay this bill, unless the fundamentals of our government are to be overturned.
I do not believe Federal Government fear me at all, they know the truth. They know I am not a dangerous person, they hold me as a hostage to discourage other people from possibly standing up to their valued system. In their minds, right or wrong the public is expected to lay down for them. You see examples of this, at the Ruby Ridge massacre and the Waco massacre, where they killed all those children and group members.
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect....what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? ...Death on the other hand, is the final silence...my silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.
You've a right to believe that we're governed by Nature and the hidden Force within her. You can think that the gods, including my Melitele, are merely a personification of this power invented for simpletons so they can understand it better, accept its existence. According to you, that power is blind. But for me, Geralt, faith allows you to expect what my goddess personifies from nature: order, law, goodness. And hope.
There are two magic acts I want to pull off when I write. One is creating a feeling that when you're inside a book, you believe everything you're reading even when you know it's not true. And the second is an extension of that, which is you know it's not true, you know it's not real, but you believe it anyway. And it's that believing of the story that isn't real that attracted me to writing and storytelling in general.
A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books.
Being an Irishwoman means many things to me. An Irishwoman is strong and feisty. She has guts and stands up for what she believes in. She believes she is the best at whatever she does and proceeds through life with that knowledge. She can face any hazard that life throws her way and stay with it until she wins. She is loyal to her kinsmen and accepting of others. She's not above a sock in the jaw if you have it coming.
We are proceeding on the basis of common values. We have more to gain from partnership, from promoting our partnership in dealing with the big global challenges. I, therefore, believe that in the near future, not much is going to change in the relations between E.U., Greece and the United States of America. These are relations that were forged under very difficult conditions and rely on the common values of our people.