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The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.
For the rest of your life you must check the box on employment applications asking the dreaded question: "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" And once you check that box, the odds are sky high that your application is going straight to the trash. Hundreds of professional licenses are off-limits to people convicted of felonies.
What was interesting to me was how they actually went to 9/11 and they chose that as part of his back story that we can unravel because it's something that people have shied away from for very obvious reasons. The opportunity to deal with some of that aftermath and the sensitivity, we can use that, and it will be a really neat thing.
Ecstasy is our very nature, not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. That's why you look so tired, because misery is real hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against the nature.
It's an essay that Sigmund Freud wrote about E.T.A. Hoffman's short story called "The Sandman" where someone mistakes an inanimate object for a living, breathing human being. And one of the things that Sigmund Freud really felt was that in modern life people assign qualities to objects around them that may not exist there whatsoever.
A lot of people say, "Oh, I get this high from working out." I've never felt that, maybe because I've worked out for so long it's just a norm for me to push super, super hard. I don't feel the euphoria. But at the end, when it's all done, I feel euphoric. I'm like, "Yes, the work is done." You just feel like a glowing feeling inside.
For me any moment in front of a crowd is embarrassing, because I can't stand being in front of people. I'm probably one of the worst public speakers. I try to avoid it, but there are times when it's just too rude not to do it. But there really isn't a moment that's not embarrassing for me if I'm going to stand up in front of a crowd.
If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release!
If you continue to transfer the wealth of the population of the planet to a very small amount of people, it becomes untenable at some point, a democracy, because people eventually will realize what's going on. You can only bulls - t people through kinds of media outlets for so long, and eventually you have to physically control them.
All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.
I do cherish those moments when I can just relax in the hotel room. Because there are a lot of details that have to be taken care of aside from just getting up onstage. You're dealing with a number of human beings whose well-being and safety you're concerned about. There are people I like to meet and talk to in the crew and the band.
I'm a very creative person, and you know when I hooked up with Benny Boom, I said I want it to be a different kind of video. I want it to be crisp, and I want it to relate, [and] not to be so far over people's heads. And that's when we came up with the p-t-d-d-d-d-d (camera flashes.) You know with the picture changing, and that's it.
You hear a lot of jokes every once in a while about 'Silent Cal Coolidge.' The joke is on the people who make the jokes. Look at his record. He cut the taxes four times. We had probably the greatest growth and prosperity that we've ever known. I have taken heed of that because if he did that by doing nothing, maybe that's the answer.
Civilized life, if it is to be stable, must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting. In Australia, where people are few, and rabbits are many, I watched the whole populace satisfying the primitive impulse in the primitive manner by the skilful slaughter of many thousands of rabbits.
The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution protects citizens against cruel and unusual punishment. And there is a growing body of legal precedent that shows that transgender people who are incarcerated should be provided with these medically necessary procedures. In cases where they're not, it is considered a violation of those rights.
That is the operatic problem; the singer must keep up a big head of steam while trying to appear secretive, or seductive, or consumptive. Some ingenious composer should write an opera about a group of people who were condemned by a cruel god to scream all the time; it would be an instantaneous success, and a triumph of versimilitude.
We said we would meet again but we made no arrangements. Not out of any bad feeling between us, but because I felt it had all been said, or not said but understood, and she probably did too. To know she was there was enough, and for her to know I was around was probably too. Sometimes that's all people ever really need. Just to know.
Writers shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of what they’re doing, and they should treat it with great seriousness. You’re doing something that really matters, you’re telling stories that have an impact on other people and on the culture. You should tell the best stories you can possibly tell and put everything you’ve got into it.
People think of a business cycle, which is a boom followed by a recession and then automatic stabilizers revive the economy. But this time we can't revive. The reason is that every recovery since 1945 has begun with a higher, and higher level of debt. The debt is so high now, that since 2008 we've been in what I call, debt deflation.
President [Barack] Obama has talked about fundamentally transforming this country. There's 7 billion people across the face of the globe, many of whom want to come to this country. If they come legally, great. But if they come illegally and they get amnesty, that is how we fundamentally change this country, and it really is striking.
I ain't the first on the list that people are sending scripts to. I'm very lucky. I've managed to put myself in the position with some directors, yes, who will be calling me directly, and we're working on things and talking about things, but that's on a purely creative level. And then you go and have to deal with the financial level.
I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.
The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing.
In L.A., a lot of comics live here, but we don't get to spend that much time together because we've got to drive 45 minutes home, or do another set. So in San Francisco we can hang out, go for dinner - the community aspect of it is really lovely, as well as seeing people's shows that you don't normally get to see a longer version of.
Our focus was directed at developing the best possible and easiest to use product, and this is where we invested our time. Realize that you won't be able to bring the same focus to everything in the beginning. There won't be enough people or enough hours in the day. So, focus on the 20 percent that makes 80 percent of the difference.
I can't tell you how many times people - through the anonymity and safety of the Internet, of course - have told me 'You beat women' as if it was an ongoing, daily thing. The only person ever brave enough to say it to my face quickly surrendered his courage when I said, 'Would you like to step outside and see if I can beat men, too?'
Excess consumption doesn't make people happy. We can continue to provide for our needs, but we can't continue the endless pursuit of ever more consumer goods. There is no energy source that can provide enough consumer goods to meet our human and emotional needs; there never has been, and that's why it's been such a fruitless pursuit.
We're [Clinton Foundation] trying to get rapid tests that give you results when you're right there on site at an affordable price. Ninety percent of the HIV-positive people in the world don't know they have the infection. An enormous amount of infections are being perpetrated by people who don't know they themselves are HIV positive.
Doing [a relationship comedy] with Sam [L. Jackson] was exciting. I've done a lot of comedies with a lot of comedy people. My peers. I've never worked with anybody of the kind of dramatic caliber of movie actor that Sam is. It was a little bit intimidating for the first day. Or two... Or the first week. Other than that, it was a joy.
There is emotion in the hug, and there is respect and a form of love. Emotion that comes from honesty, respect that comes from challenge, and the form of love that exists between people whose minds have touched, whose hearts have touched, whose souls have touched. Our minds touched. Our hearts touched. Our souls touched. We separate.
Nothing works on the campaign trail like attacks on candidates for bad attendance. It alienates people on both sides of every issue and reflects a callous disregard of the work of the people. The feeble argument that "I'm running for president" isn't much of a rebuttal: George W. Bush finds time to be president, and he's running too.
Watch out for music. It should come with a health warning. It can be dangerous. It can make you feel so alive, so connected to the people around you, and connected to what you really are inside. And it can make you think that the world should, and could, be a much better place. And just occasionally, it can make you very, very happy.
I am astounded at my age with a 20-year-old daughter to discover that kids of her generation don't want to watch black and white movies. I understand that they gave up on silent films, but black and white? So, now movies have to be taught in academia because people don't know how to watch them, they don't know how to appreciate them.
Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you.
It is essential to rear a generation at the very top of society that has all the qualities needed to lead and give the people the inspiration and the drive to make it succeed. In short, the elite.. Every society tries to produce this type. The British have special schools for them: the gifted and talented are sent to Eton and Harrow.
Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.
As soon as I stood up on that hard surfboard, I went so fast and it was such an incredible feeling that I was obsessed, and I fell in love with it, so I never stopped. So, that's how it all started, being around people at the beach and other surfers and then finally getting an actual surf board, and falling in love with that feeling.
The Rich arrived in pairs And also in Rolls Royces; They talked of their affairs In loud and strident voices... The Poor arrived in Fords, Whose features they resembled; They laughed to see so many Lords And Ladies all assembled. The People in Between Looked underdone and harassed, And our of place and mean, And Horribly embarrassed.
I think a lot of the reason people are attracted to the Keystone pipeline is because at least we're doing something. There's a fear that society will collapse if it's not acting. To contrast those actions with other actions is important in making it feel plausible. Maybe we must have the size of the dream meet the size of the threat.
I can't stand stage mothers. It doesn't work. You definitely feel that with the new generation of pop stars right now they've all managed to work it out for themselves. You have to have confidence in that. When you're young, you know your market better than I will. I love having young people on the show because I can learn from them.
I think the hardest part is figuring out what to say no to because the whole start of your career is just begging anybody to let you perform or to contribute music to something. Then it's like turning on a faucet because the moment it's on, people are like, "Oh, you can do stuff? All right. Well, you want to do it every single thing?
The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world.
A lot of people have a fear of Shakespeare. Even actors do. People are like, "Oh, I won't go and see Shakespeare because the language is so hard," but it is. When you read it on the page, you go, "What?! What does that mean?!" If you go to a Shakespeare play and you've never been, you sit there and go, "I'm an idiot! I don't get it!"
We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place; the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.
I was having problems with depression and anxiety disorder, and it felt like not blogging about it was creating a false history. When I did finally share the problems I was having, I was shocked - not only by the support that was given to me, but also by the incredible amount of people who admitted they struggled with the same thing.
What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power or influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly. It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a picture of themselves as so very sagacious, honest and well-intentioned.
I don't know what to say to people. It's become so big. It's become part of the cultural environment. For the first and second Twiglight, I knew exactly what to say to people. If you don't know what the story is by now, then you've probably never been to the cinema before. How about, "Why not go to the cinema for once?" I don't know.
I feel that there are great minds up there who would like to see what I can do with an Oscar nomination. I guess many people would change after a nomination in the way they see things. In my case it's really irrelevant in terms of what I do. Still, it was an incredible experience which I will put in my memories, like everything else.
Traveling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons, and some people such as [Thomas] Gray and Horace Walpole, never feel quite the same to one another again, and it is nobody's fault, as one knows if one listens to the stories of both, though it seems to be some people's fault more than others.
Evolution is far more than a belief or an educated guess about how people came to be as they are. It is, in fact, the product of converging evidence from many, many different fields of science. Many, many thousands of studies that, in fact, have provided a theory, an organizing principal in fact, that describes how humans came to be.