Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.

There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.

It's the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It's a quality to be proud of. But it's a quality that many people seem to have neglected.

Life is best enjoyed when time periods are evenly divided between labor, sleep, and recreation...all people should spend one-third of their time in recreation which is rebuilding, voluntary activity, never idleness.

I spoke French a bit, and I could speak a bit of this and that, and when you were taught those things by people who couldn't really do it, you can do some pretty wonderfully, imaginative horrific things to teachers.

I get mail from people all over the world now from people who tell me that they didn't really understand Down syndrome, but because of me they have read about it and studied it and now they know a lot more about it.

I used to let other people's struggles affect my happiness. If they weren't happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn't happy, I didn't want anyone around me to be happy.

There are the people who really, really enjoy being celebrities, and then there are the people who came by it maybe by accident. I'm one of those people who fiercely guards their privacy, so I hate doing interviews.

As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project.

People come up to us and ask how we knew so much about their own family... I'm talking about people from faraway places, too. I get people from Turkey and Chile coming up to me and saying I wrote about their family.

If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there's very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it's melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold.

The way America appreciates cinema is different from anywhere in the world. It's celebrated and supported. I don't just mean by the individuals, but financially as well people are throwing money at certain projects.

People get comfortable with the way you are—they have formed their opinion of you based on everything they see and know about you as a person. When you change that up by losing weight, they no longer understand you.

There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.

On the Vietnam War: I've lived under situations where every decent man declared war first and I've lived under situations where you don't declare war. We've been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains.... But it can put mountains where there are none. Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.

Those that God used in the past were just ordinary people with an extraordinary Master. They were not all champions of great faith, but little people who saw their own need, and put their small faith in a great God.

I firmly believe that the inequity [in society] is enormous. The people have the feeling that you are allowed to do anything if you are rich. But if you're poor, you have to pay. We [Europeans] have to counter this.

A wholesome family is one where there is a lot of love. It's living by example. It's acceptance of people at their core, but it's also pushing each other to be our best selves and try things we might not be good at.

You need to have a state pension that doesn't drag more and more people into means-testing each year and make it very difficult for people on low to medium term incomes to save and not see their savings clawed away.

People change, couples change, and you have to be able to accept what is coming without trying to hang on things that you had before that they may disappear but they may transform into something that is even better.

Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.

People who are pierced should not be snickered at, should not become the object of ridicule, should not be singled out for special and uneven and unequal treatment. They should be respected just like everybody else.

The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is.

There are people who are socially ambitious. If you go back aways, the Sculls, for instance, had a lot of money and they were socially ambitious. If you get an old master, it's not going to do you any good socially.

I suppose my look, the way I play - you combine all that sort of stuff and that makes people interested in what I actually do. So then, when off-the-field stuff happens... I suppose it's one of those cocktail mixes.

Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don't feel they're good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven't yet put the work in to develop them.

The gospel of licentiousness, of selfishness, of blaming all the difficulties of life on external factors - these are the things that are killing people today in ways that the slave whips and the overseers couldn't.

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people.

Coolness is temporary. You can't capture it or create it, it has to be discovered. It has to do with the people that are in a place, not with monuments or institutions. It's a momentary conjunction of personalities.

Real Jews, in concord with some Muslims, continue their war against Zionists and against Israeli crimes. The oppressed people of Palestine living under occupation must feel that believers of all faiths support them.

I enjoy being given a certain amount of freedom in order to interpret or to come up with stuff, but I do enjoy collaboration. I seek and thrive on projects where I am going to learn from the people I'm working with.

I've found what I was looking for, Child: what people call love between a man and a woman is a season. And if, at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery, at its waning, it's only a heap of rotting leaves.

I met Andy Warhol in the '60s, a wonderful time, with wonderful people. There was Fred Hughes, and Jed Johnson, who I liked a lot. Jed Johnson decorated my apartment in New York, at the Pierre. It was his first job.

So many of my friends are older, and the people I work with are older. I guess I've gotten used to hearing people say, "Oh, you're so young," even though I never really agreed with that. Now I get their perspective.

I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I'm [expletive] insane, like I'm Hitler. One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did.

There was other stuff, too, like how something can be so much more than the parts it took to make it, and why people need things around them that lift them above their lives and make them feel the miracle of living.

I had to drop a boulder to wake people up about the A.R.T. We've done that, and now we have audiences again who want cutting-edge work, who want to be challenged, but who also won't be falling asleep at the theater.

A good manager doesn't try to eliminate conflict; he tries to keep it from wasting the energies of his people. If you're the boss and your people fight you openly when they think that you are wrong - that's healthy.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Much of the research on the Nazi era makes a science out of distancing oneself from it or conjuring its demons. The conceit is that people were monsters then - as if they were completely different from people today.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.

Perhaps all our troubles - all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome - began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.

We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

The most beautiful surprise is that you have these moments where you connect with people on a deep level without saying a word. It's one of those wonderful things that you get what you give, and I'm grateful for it.

People will come to your site because you have good compelling content. You need to hit it from all angles: blog posts, articles, graphs, data, infographics, interactive content - even short pictures when you Tweet.

We do have situations where people are being advised not to use their well water. That's a huge problem because you know they're farmers and they rely on that water for their cattle and their horses and their crops.

I have this necklace I always wear. I collect pendants from people I love; my best friends and members of my family have all given me one, and I put them on this chain so no matter where I am they're always with me.

Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.

It was quite a ride and very conflicting for me, too - to be nominated for an Oscar, to be straight and healthy, and to be getting all these accolades while these people around me were suffering and dying from AIDS.

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