Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.
In the beginning of the book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Edward is more enamored of himself than he is of anybody else. He's a very fine rabbit; he's been constructed incredibly well, and he has a wardrobe of amazing clothing. He's arrogant, and he doesn't care whether Abilene loves him or not. As the journey progresses, as he gets passed from hand to hand, he learns what it means to love. He gets more and more bedraggled, and his clothing is lost; yet he becomes finer in soul and heart than he was at the beginning of the journey.
Some day there may be... machinery that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o'er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods - in short, a machine that will discriminately select its subject and, by means of a skillful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print, and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will be nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society's exhibition and gratefully to receive the 'Royal Medal'.
Kitty Kelley's method, already perfected in her unauthorised and unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, is to write bestsellers that take what she describes as an 'unblinking look' at their subjects - which might, of course, mean that her eyes are permanently open or permanently closed... the result is a work so bad that Britons cannot realise how fortunate they are in being unable to buy it. The great mistake with this book is not that it has been published in Britain, but that it has actually been published anywhere else.
Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.
Lee was very much his own person so it's impossible to know quite what he would have thought but part of the reason for me staying is that I believe he always wanted this to be a house that would be here forever, that he never wanted his name not to mean anything any more. And I want that too. I want Alexander McQueen to continue. Then, in a hundred years time, there will still be this house that he created, this great place that represents modernity and creativity and beauty and romance and all of those things. That, I think, would be amazing.
I don`t know if this is good politics or bad politics to criticize Trump, but you`ve got to call out, just like people in communities when people say racist things and feel it`s OK now to be a sexist or a racist or a misogynist or a bigot, individuals have to call them out, I have to call them out when I see it. You have to call out this president when he engages, when he hires somebody that makes people even more uncomfortable. I mean, it`s not a difference in policy. People in this country, the fear levels are higher than I can ever remember.
We have made covenants so to do solemn, sacred, holy covenants, pledging ourselves before gods and angels. We are under covenant to live the law of obedience. We are under covenant to live the law of sacrifice. We are under covenant to live the law of consecration. It is our privilege to consecrate our time, talents, and means to build up his kingdom. We are called upon to sacrifice, in one degree or another, for the furtherance of his work. Obedience is essential to salvation; so, also, is service; and so, also, are consecration and sacrifice.
We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it's like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also, watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.
We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.
The script [of Regression] wasn't the draw for me. It was largely Alejandro [Amenabar] and his way of talking. To hear him talking about the script was way more interesting than the script. He wrote it, and so, English is his second language. It's an interesting thing. I've had that before. I was directed by Alfonso Cuarón before, too. It's always interesting when you're being directed by somebody like that. So much of directing is about communication, and finding the right words, and what it means, and how to convey certain emotions and ideas.
I really, really love to move. You know what I mean? I mean, it's not a workout, but I absolutely love to do it, and that's performing, which is very close to doing Zumba. When you're onstage and you're moving everything, every single part of your body, it's actually working and active to the tips of your fingers. You're burning a hell of a lot of calories. And I think that's what people always look forward to - they want to know how many calories they've burned, and it's really important to actually know that and know your nutrition even more.
If I say any word, like, "Sit next to me." There is a chemistry inside of my brain and your brain that is figuring out what that means and turning that request into action. The brain is designed in a way to enable us to translate these strange interaction codes that people have with each other into something that can manifest a whole company's success. That's so extraordinary and that's what's going on. Everybody in the world needs to know that, in the whole planet. I just talked to somebody who studies cosmoses. She said, "Cosmoses need this."
I tell the truth and I don't try to sugarcoat things. But I also decided that if you don't use humor or satire, then it's just too dark all the time. And one of my favorite literary works is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. As you know, that was an enormously famous satire piece that was able to point out, you know, things to people in a different way. And I do believe that satire and humor can reveal truth in a way that sometimes doesn't get revealed through other means. And so I decided to, every now and then, use satire and humor as well.
I think that there's an idea in 2016 that if a woman doesn't have it all then she's lacking in some way, and I think that 'having it all' is the kid, the relationship and the career, and that seems horribly skewed. I get genuinely excited when I meet women - or men - who don't want to have children. It's refreshing and unusual and means they're not swayed by what society has told them, they're just listening to their own basic instincts. I love meeting people who are fulfilled by other things. I think, 'lucky old you' when I meet someone single.
She understood the genre constraints, the decencies were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured price. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.
Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.
I am fundamentally happy. Everyone has experiences that makes them cynical, jaded or unhappy - you just have to fight those things off. I have totally emotional days when I cry and get insecure. PMS weirded out, doomed and tragic. I mean, I'm definitely not just a lollipop, happy in the wind girl. I'm human just like everyone else, but I think that it would be tragic to be on your deathbed and think, 'I could've I should've.' That gets me out of bed everyday. I can't even last like an hour in bed in the morning. I have to get out there and live.
There were obvious budgetary and time constraint differences. With Jamie Marks is Dead, we were operating on a pretty small finance level. So it was definitely run-and-gun, 16-hour days, every day. I would come back, and I was so exhausted I would fall asleep in my clothes. Obviously, with The Giver we had a little bit more time to take the full three months. So that was different, but in both there was still a creative environment, and by that I mean that it was still collaborative, performance was still valued, and it wasn't lost in the money.
I do think we have a food problem. In 2006, which is the year for which we have the latest data, 35.5 million Americans were food insecure. That means there are 35.5 million Americans who are so hard up at some point during the year that they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. That's a lot of Americans. They don't get reported very much because there's nothing spectacular about people skipping a meal because they're poor. The media tends to ignore that, just as it ignores the sort of chronic food shortages elsewhere in the world.
I'm not trying to be mean. You [ Nicholas Kristof] have written about climate change. You're really concerned and you've thought a lot about the suffering of people in other countries. It doesn't seem like you have thought that deeply about the suffering of your fellow Americans. You don't have the solutions say as you do for global warming. And my question is: Isn't it always easier for the elites to identify with abstractions or poor people in other countries and kind of ignore their own country men. I have noticed this. Have you noticed that?
There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women. These should therefore be our chief study; we should insinuate ourselves into their good opinion, give them hints of emancipation from the tyranny of public opinion, and of standing up for themselves; it will be an immense relief to their enslaved minds to be freed from any one bond of restraint, and it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal, without knowing that they do so; for they will only be indulging their own desire of personal admiration.
Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.
I'm still the same person I've always been. I can't say exactly what I'll do; I'm an excessive person. Talk about violence-----I don't do anything violent. Talk about violence, what's going on in Nicaragua? What's going on in El Salvador? That's violent. What are they doing to the planet with chemicals and acid rain? That's violent. What are people doing to each other? Raping. That's violent. I'm striking out at ac icon that has no life. There's a big difference between what has life and what doesn't. I mean. I've been a vegetarian for 16 years.
Education has two aspects; the first is related to external and worldly education, which is nothing but acquiring bookish knowledge. In the modern world, we find many well versed and highly qualified in this aspect. The second aspect known as Educare is related to human values. The word Educare means to bring out that which is within. Human values are latent in every human being; one cannot acquire them from outside. They have to be elicited from within. Educare means to bring out human values. 'To bring out' means to translate them into action.
The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists exists; what is is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced. Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality–it is our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see." -Richard
Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism, and self-assertive individualism. We remain resident aliens, OF the world but not profoundly in it, dining at the banquet table of waning modernity without a whisper of table grace. We all wear biblical name tags (Joseph, David, and Sarah), but have forgotten what our Christian names mean.
There is nothing so charming as the knowledge of literature; of that branch of literature, I mean, which enables us to discover the infinity of things, the immensity of Nature, the heavens, the earth, and the seas; this is that branch which has taught us religion, moderation, magnanimity, and that has rescued the soul from obscurity; to make her see all things above and below, first and last, and between both; it is this that furnishes us wherewith to live well and happily, and guides us to pass our lives without displeasure and without offence.
We know that Russia has done things that are very much against our interests. They've done things that require us to take punitive action against Russia. That does not mean we can't work with Russia where we have a common agenda. Russia is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council; we need their help in isolating North Korea and their nuclear weapons violations. So, we still need to work with Russia. But Russia's done things that are contrary to our national security interest, and the US must respond to those types of activities.
What does it really mean to be a leftist in the early part of the 21st century? What are we really talking about? And I can just be very candid with you. It means to have a certain kind of temperament, to make certain kinds of political and ethical choices, and to exercise certain analytical focuses in targeting on the catastrophic and the monstrous, the scandalous, the traumatic, that are often hidden and concealed in the deodorized and manicured discourses of the mainstream. That's what it means to be a leftist. So let's just be clear about it.
This law represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means completed--a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions, to act as a protection to future administrations of the Government against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy--a law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation--in other words, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. [...] It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for twenty years just without fighting more often than once a week.
The ever-mounting glut of waste materials is characteristic by-product of modern consumer society. It might even be argued that capitalism's continual need to find of generate markets means that disposibility and waste have become the spine of the system. To consume means, literally, to destroy or expend, and in the garbage crisis we confront the underlying truth of a society in which enormous productive capacities and market forces have harnessed human needs and desires, without regard to the long or even short-term future of life on the planet.
Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is: what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problems of the modern novel is: what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
I'm not saying to the kids yo drop out of school, education is the most important thing first and foremost. You know, my circumstances were a little different. I needed to work to help out so I couldn't be in school. Not only that, it was getting into trouble and all that s**t. I was getting into trouble more in school than I was out of school, so I had to just go ahead and make that adjustment, so I mean realistically I always tell everybody, in my case I don't got a high school diploma, but I have two Grammys so it kinda worked out best for me.
It hath been said, that there is of nothing so much in hell as of self-will. The which is true, for there is nothing else there than self-will, and if there were no self-will, there would be no Devil and no hell. When it is said that Lucifer fell from Heaven, and turned away from God and the like, it meaneth nothing else than that he would have his own will, and would not be at one with the Eternal Will. So was it likewise with Adam in Paradise. And when we say Self-will, we mean, to will otherwise than as the One and Eternal Will of God willeth.
But I liked you from the moment I first heard your voice,” he said, “when I had no idea what you looked like. I thought it delicious, the way you bargained for me, as though I were an old rug. Then I loved the way you looked at me. Then I loved the way you ordered me about. I loved your patient and impatient ways of explaining things to me. I love the sound of your voice and the way you move. I love your courage and your kindness and your generosity and your obstinacy and your passion.” He paused. “You’re the genius. What do you think that means?
Man has risen, not fallen. He can choose to develop his capacities as the highest animal and to try to rise still farther, or he can choose otherwise. The choice is his responsibility, and his alone. There is no automatism that will carry him upward without choice or effort and there is no trend solely in the right direction. Evolution has no purpose; man must supply this for himself. The means to gaining right ends involve both organic evolution and human evolution, but human choice as to what are the right ends must be based on human evolution.
To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can be accomplished only piecemeal, a step at a time.
Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.
The West would be well advised to change its approach towards failing states. At present, no major power can find the correct ways and means - and the numbers of failing states are increasing. This year we watched the collapse of Mali, a consequence of the Libyan civil war. The south of Libya and Mali, and Niger too, are well on the way to becoming a no-man's land. After 9/11, George W. Bush and Tony Blair made the promise that they would not tolerate failed states because they could become a haven for terrorists. And today? The number increases.
[The Book of the Law]was lost for so many years. And then Josiah decided to celebrate Passover. The text says that "The Passover sacrifice had not been offered in that way ... during the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah" [2 Kings 23:22]. What do you mean? Not in the days of David and Solomon? Never before? And what of the days of the prophets? What happened? That's what I'm anguishing over. If the Book of the Law could be forgotten for so many years, who knows what was done to it during those years? Maybe it was lost later, too.
If you take this life to be simply what old religious folks pretend (I mean the effete, gone to seed in a drought, mere human galls stung by the devil once), then all your joy and serenity is reduced to grinning and bearing it. The fact is, you have got to take the world on your shoulders like Atlas, and "put along" with it. You will do this for an idea's sake, and your success will be in proportion to your devotion to ideas. It may make your back ache occasionally, but you will have the satisfaction of hanging it or twirling it to suit yourself.
In education, it is said that the state must impose schooling on all children, else the parents and communities will neglect it. Only the state can make sure that no child is left behind. The only question is the means: will we use the union and bureaucracies favored by the left, or the market incentives and vouchers favored by the right. I don't want to get into a debate about which means is better, but only to draw attention to the reality that these are both forms of planning that compromise the freedom of families to manage their own affairs.
I think the press, by and large, is what we call "liberal". But of course what we call "liberal" means well to the right. "Liberal" means the "guardians of the gates". So the New York Times is "liberal" by, what's called, the standards of political discourse, New York Times is liberal, CBS is liberal. I don't disagree. I think they're moderately critical at the fringes. They're not totally subordinate to power, but they are very strict in how far you can go. And in fact, their liberalism serves an extremely important function in supporting power.
A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's less well off to become tomorrow's rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life.
'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here - five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks?"
When someone tells you you're not going to walk again and you spend about a year and half on your back, your clothes don't mean much. I was in a robe every day, so I gave everything away - my whole wardrobe, down to the last dress. But at some point I woke up, maybe about four or five months after having done that that, and I thought, "You know what? I really want to try to wear high heels." That's why I wanted to learn to walk. It sounded really stupid but I just wanted to see. That to me was sort of definitive to who I was. So that was my goal.
...Now since you are celebrating the holy Pascha, you should know, brethren, what the Pascha is. Pascha means the crossing-over, and so the Festival is called by this name. For it was on this day that the Children of Israel crossed over out of Egypt, and the Son of God crossed over from this world to His Father. What gain is it to celebrate unless you imitate Him Whom you worship; that is, unless you cross over from Egypt, that is, from the darkness of evildoing to the light of virtue, from the love of this world to the love of your heavenly home?
First, In showing in how to avoid attempting impossibilities. Second, In securing us from important mistakes in attempting what is, in itself possible, by means either inadequate or actually opposed to the end in view. Thirdly, In enabling us to accomplish our ends in the easiest, shortest, most economical, and most effectual manner. Fourth, In inducing us to attempt, and enabling us to accomplish, object which, but for such knowledge, we should never have thought of understanding. On the ways that a knowledge of the order of nature can be of use.
