Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
Almost all the worlds' constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which We the People tell the government what it is allowed to do. We the People are free.
The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.
People will say to me, ‘You’ve played so many strong women,’ and I’ll say, ‘Have you ever said to a man, “You’ve played so many strong men?”’ No! Because the expectation is [men] are varied. Why can’t we have that expectation about women?
We only have X amount of days and time on this planet - how am I going to spend that time? The way that I want to spend it is caring about the people that I love the most, and fighting to make the world a more livable place for everybody.
I don't analyze what I'm doing. I've read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I've noticed something that I wasn't aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I'm just very, very smart.
Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers' councils, people's councils, call them what you want, popular committees.
Spend at least 20-30% of your time marketing. You have to pay for this either way. Either you pay a gallery to do this for you , or you put your time and effort into it. Unless people see the great art you're making, they'll never buy it.
When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other's ultimate comfort.
People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.
If the U.S. monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world. The same fate awaits the accomplices of the United States.
People should support equality because of their religion not despite it. These are the values that openness, inclusion, diversity promote. And they're directly opposed to the kind of enforced closet of certain interpretations of religion.
Fashion is here to help make people look very important. If they have good taste and choose what suits them, I give them options on how they can do that. It's always sexy, and it's always with the same result: making women look fantastic.
When you think about it, some people don't like certain things, but when it comes to music, no matter who you are, where you're from, what kind of personality you've got...everyone loves music of some sort; that's what's so epic about it.
You'd have to give people free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more.
You know, I think the greatest gift in the world is a good employee, you know, or people who can do your work for you and do it well the way you'd like to have it done. And I've always been able to surround myself with really good people.
The fashion industry tends to attract people with serious personality defects. They just want to be rich and famous. But at some point you have to decide: Are you going to mindlessly go the easy way or are you going to go the ethical way?
One of the things I've learned with doing 'xkcd' is that you sort of give people, 'Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.' Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than, 'Here's a long page of things.
The primary role of the church is to reflect God's value system in society and to train people in that value system. It's not the government's responsibility, nor are they equipped to do that on the most local level where the need exists.
I think it's really good and helpful to have the people you most admire in some other discipline than what you work in. It's too intimidating and derivative to be just totally gobsmacked by someone doing exactly the same thing as you are.
What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.
Because Scientology is perceived and conceived by Scientologists as being this salvation for mankind, you can have people that lie with a very straight face if they believe that what they are doing is protecting the Church of Scientology.
I always made up my own acts; built them out of my knowledge and observation of real life. I'd had wonderful opportunities to study people; and every time I went out on the stage I tried to show the audience some bit of true human nature.
Some people say I make mistakes. I just say that this is the secret of enjoying life. I hate monotony. Why don't they leave me freedom of choice? People want to impose choices which aren't necessarily mine. That's the mistake people make.
I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer . . . if he can only . . . tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes.
For if enough people were really convinced that growth should be halted, and if they acted on that conviction, then billions of others might be deprived of any realistic hope of gaining the opportunities now enjoyed by the more fortunate.
I'm willing to engage or indulge real ideas, but if we don't do something [about global warming], we're all going to die! What's it going to take, a big f--ing disaster with all kinds of people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.
Every single aspect of myself, let me put it this way, it's all about trying to incorporate. It's about trying to weave the web and keep everyone happy. And of course, it's about giving value to those people so they continue to sponsor me.
Anybody can develop a certain amount of talent at something. However, the supremely talented - the superstars - are people who have married a gift of brain wiring to those thousands of hours of practice, usually in favorable circumstances.
I think people who are horrifically abused as children and then start to repeat the same thing to their own offspring or to others, you start to see evil inherent. That's what the Catholic Church feels is necessary to exorcise, to cleanse.
I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.
Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.
God, I love the "fine morality" of the wealthy and powerful. You'll spill tears over your own, in a heartbeat. And then never even look twice at people below you, whose very lives are ground under every day, day after day, year after year.
Most people are basically a victim of the circumstances of their life. They have things like 9/11, they have terrorism threats, they have new war threats, they have economy problems, and they think, 'What can I do? I'm basically a victim.'
But I'm here to serve people. I'm not here to wave my finger in people's faces and point out to them how terrible they are or what I hate about them or anything along those lines. That's not my place. I'm in no position to condemn anybody.
And why should we, of all people, expect the proud new developing nations to see the world precisely as we see it? Was any new nation ever more outspoken, independent and unaligned than the young America of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln?
The most important thing I think teachers can do for young people is to make them inquiring, is to ensure that they know how to gather information, that they check information and they take their information from a multiplicity of sources.
Laws that treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves: as equals. If we are going to stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime, then that is the change we need to spread.
To tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I know. I keep meeting people, both older and younger, who seem to have accrued so much more knowledge or expertise or certainty about who they are and the jobs they do. I just marvel at it.
I like to see people put themselves into films, which is part of the reason why I love Woody Allen films so much - I believe his actors' work. I have a feeling that many actors in his films are similar to their characters, and I like that.
It's been such a huge part of my life, it's hard for me to separate it out. All I can say is that I had an extraordinary childhood. I was around these amazing people and went to exotic locations. The whole movie-making thing is so magical.
Socially in my alliances I wanted to just have a strong alliance and making decisions but not putting it out there but letting other people be the target in that way. I think it worked until I should not have been playing that way anymore.
In this post-modern culture in which we live - where people question absolute truth - stories are resistant to platitudes; they're resistant to me making declarations of truth to them. A story can do that in kind of a Trojan-horse fashion.
It's super important that people use their significant buying power to pull companies like Ferrari and show them there is a market for sustainable fuel. So many other car companies would take notice if Ferrari made headway on this measure.
When you talk about sacrifices, the ones in my family who have sacrificed are my children, because I love what I'm doing. I love the work. I love to go out there and talk about organizing the people. To me, that's something I really enjoy.
When you print money, the money does not flow evenly into the economic system. It stays essentially in the financial service industry and among people that have access to these funds, mostly well-to-do people. It does not go to the worker.
When you spend your life acting and being other people, as opposed to being the one person that you are, you learn that life is gray sometimes, not black and white. That what you thought was true isn't necessarily true if you switch sides.
I've actually heard people protesting furiously about straight male costume people as well. It's not universal and there are examples that break the mould all over the place. In my experience, it's more prevalent in the UK than in America.
I approach every show from the same fundamental perspective: this is a conversation, and my job is to make people leave the show feeling like they've seen something singular. It's not about smashing someone over the head from the jump-off.