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Michael Jackson? He was something more (than one of my favorite entertainers), a true friend. He wasn't just a genius. Above all, he was a good person, who gave so much. He gave people values, he encouraged them to better themselves all the time. He was far deeper and more authentic than people could see. He was misunderstood too many times
So when it comes to being a role model to women, I think it's because of the way that I feel about myself, and the way that I treat myself. I am a woman, I treat myself with respect and I love myself, and I think that if I'm holding myself to a certain esteem and keeping it real with myself, then that's going to translate to people like me.
One of the most painfully inauthentic ways we show up in our lives sometimes is saying "yes" when we mean "no," and saying "no" when we mean "hell yes." I'm the oldest of four, a people-pleaser - that's the good girl straitjacket that I wear sometimes. I spent a lot of my life saying yes all the time and then being pissed off and resentful.
People who supported Obama felt like they formed a relationship, that they were being spoken to. The way that campaign worked and the way he's worked during his first term is to make people feel like he's grasping their hand, whether it's by tweeting or email, moments after an event, sometimes during an event. It makes people relate to him.
Take cyberspace as an example. We had this wonderful utopian vision of a new home for the mind. What we've reaped isn't cyberspace. It's cyberbia. It's this vast, bland wasteland of vulgar people and trivial ideas and pictures of half-naked starlets. But despite all the uncertainty, has there ever been a more fascinating moment to be alive?
There is a great danger to the world, not only to my country [Israel] but to the United States, to the Middle East, to peace, to all of humanity, from the prospect that such regimes that brutalize its own people, that sponsors terrorism more than any other regime in the world - that this regime acquires atomic bombs is very, very dangerous.
When a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.
I actually met Larson [Paine] on Larchmont in Los Angeles. He was eating and he stopped me because I was massaging my larynx. I was doing a show and trying to loosen up my throat. He had sort of this southern vibe about eating alone and talking to people. And it was funny because I had just having eaten with Larry O'Keefe and Nell Benjamin.
I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough.
There's something I really like about network TV. You have this humongous audience, tens of millions of people, and you really can be in a little hut in Thailand; you really can be in the middle of an apartment in Dubai. There's something about public entertainment that I always liked. I like smaller movies, and I like public entertainment.
Experience has taught me that I connect best with others when I connect with the core of myself. When I allow God to liberate me from unhealthy dependence on people, I listen more attentively, love more unselfishly, and am more compassionate and playful. I take myself less seriously, become aware that the breath of the Father is on my face.
I believe in the spiritual warfare. There are people who pick sides. The lord of this world is Satan. You can do a deal with him to have all the pleasures of this world. You can go to youtube and search Illuminati, and you'll see stuff you wouldn't believe about very famous musicians and their musicians that are very clearly Satanic images.
The pitfall of what's happening in the media is if you're under thirty, you get your news from the Internet and The Daily Show, and there's not much discrimination between what they find on the front page of The New York Times and what they find on the Internet. That's not a bad thing, in the sense that people don't get spoon - fed anymore.
To me it seems to be important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy and happiness in life is increased that way, and the pleasures of the belief outweigh the occasional disappointments. To be a cynic about people works just the other way around and makes you incapable about enjoying the good things.
You think about people like Hank Williams, who stood on that spot of wood, and Mr. Acuff, and, of course, George Jones. And just about anybody you can think of who has made country music has been on that stage. That's what makes you so nervous - to think about the historical part of the Opry and how it's played such a part in country music.
Whatever your business - I don't care if it's radio, if it's Wall Street, if it's mainstream retail, whatever you do - do not hang around people who failed at it. Whatever you do, do not take guidance from people who failed at it - unless they, at some point, succeeded. Everybody who fails is bitter, and failures often blame everybody else.
I've found that South Africa has produced good leaders. These are people who realize that when there is danger, they should be in the forefront and when there is victory to be celebrated, they should be in the background, allowing their colleagues and the ordinary civilians - the man in the street - to rejoice and to celebrate that victory.
It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.
School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition.
People ask me a lot of questions and I don't always have the time to stop and talk, but I do a lot of email mentorship with college students. So if I meet a college kid during a motivational speech or something like that I'll stop and say, "I see you need help in this area. Here's my email. Let me help." So, it's just my way of giving back.
It doesn't bother me. Sure, everybody wants approval, but I came from the theatre and I've always treasured a remark from there which goes: 'For every six people who love you, there will be half a dozen who loathe you.' The quality of an author's work is not usually determined until after his death. Even Dickens got some pretty bad reviews.
I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. I have only just learned that truth.
The people can never willfully betray their own interests: But they may possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people; and the danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men, than where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act.
It's one of the underappreciated skills required by an innovator - they have to be able to convince lots of people to do things that might not be fully rational (invest in the company, join something that is likely to fail, try a product they've never seen before), and if you can't tell a good story it is just very hard to make that happen.
I recognize that many physicists are smarter than I am-most of them theoretical physicists. A lot of smart people have gone into theoretical physics, therefore the field is extremely competitive. I console myself with the thought that although they may be smarter and may be deeper thinkers than I am, I have broader interests than they have.
It's so important to create roles and characters and projects that feature black people in a way that's not specifically targeted toward the niche market, which is, like, a black movie is created and it's produced and pitched so that only black people will watch it ... I want to see dynamic characters and roles that everyone wants to watch.
A lot of people ask me, 'How did you have the courage to walk up to record labels when you were 12 or 13 and jump right into the music industry?' It's because I knew I could never feel the kind of rejection that I felt in middle school. Because in the music industry, if they're gonna say no to you, at least they're gonna be polite about it.
In such a fast-paced world, gathering people around a table to share a meal allows everything to slow down. I would ask people to sit at least once a week around a table and just enjoy each other's company. Give them the time to talk, laugh, and fill their bellies. It seems like a small thing, but it can bring so much joy to so many people.
You have choice. You can select joy over despair. You can select happiness over tears. You can select action over apathy. You can select growth over stagnation. You can select you. And you can select life. And it's time that people tell you you're not at the mercy of forces greater than yourself. You are, indeed, the greatest force for you.
My heart lives in so many places. With so many people. But God whispers to me that I really have only one home, and that is with Him. I will never be content on this earth. I will always be a nomad. It was meant to be that way. My heart was created with a desire for a home, a nest, a sanctuary, and that can be found only with Him in Heaven.
You can use the tax code to make people smoke less. You can use the tax code to make 'em smoke more. You can use the tax code to make 'em buy beer or buy less beer, more booze or less booze. You can screw the tax code around to make 'em make more charitable contributions. You think they're going to get rid of this power? Ain't no way, fool.
What keeps me motivated is that I'm going to do a bunch of projects with dancers, and the people who compel me and make me love dance again are the ones I want to hire because they'll do that for others who are watching the thing. So yeah, it is difficult to crush dream sometimes, but they're all professional and they know what the deal is.
I'm unfinished. I'm unfixed. And the reality is that's where God meets me is in the mess of my life, in the unfixedness, in the brokenness. I thought he did the opposite, he got rid of all that stuff. But if you read the Bible, if you look at it at all, constantly he was showing up in people's lives at the worst possible time of their life.
This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything...just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.
There's also something that is often mistaken for enlightenment which is a kind of insanity. Often, people will have some kind of weird experience which is quite abnormal and think, "Oh my God, that's it, I understand everything" because they start seeing things in a very weird way and think that's how enlightened people see things as well.
We are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.
Since the uprisings in the Middle East many scholars have come out saying that freedom comes first before the Shariah. There is also something important that we must keep in mind in our understanding the Shariah, and that is the room for what is permissible should be as wide as possible. So we should leave it open to let people be creative.
I don't like to put tags on my music. I leave that to others. Seems like some people see me as the founder of "space disco", although that's a bit weird since there were lots of music from the late 70s and early 80s that easily fits into this genre. I can understand why we need genres, but I don't feel comfortable using any on my own music.
In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally.
In my little world, I'm very protected 'cause I'm treated like the idiot I am by my buddies. But, a little bit outside that world, people sometimes expect heavy things from me. For a little time, I tried to appease and not disappoint people but in the end you're just going to kill yourself and fail if you're trying to give more than you are.
For the first time since 2007 there is political momentum behind fixing the immigration system. President Obama in his State of the Union speech reached out to the right-wing by saying illegal immigrants seeking citizenship will have to pay taxes, learn English and get in line behind people who are trying to enter the United States. legally.
In America, we've had people that are political hacks making the biggest deals in the world, bigger than companies. You take these big companies, these trade deals are far bigger than these companies, and yet we don't use our great leaders, many of whom back me and many of whom back Hillary Clinton, I must say. But we don't use those people.
I worry an awful lot about people and how they're faring. When I worry about people, whether their job is squashing their spirit, pushing them into a darker pathway of not feeling good about their life, that forces me to look for what's good. What's going well. That stokes a lot of positive feelings. Although I do worry, I look for the hope.
Crazy people who are productive are geniuses. Crazy people who are rich are eccentric. Crazy people who are neither productive nor rich are just plain crazy. Geniuses and crazy people are both out in the middle of a deep ocean; geniuses swim, crazy people drown. Most of us are sitting safely on the shore. Take a chance and get your feet wet.
In 2012, those French Muslim people voted massively for Francois Hollande against Nicolas Sarkozy. With the results of elections getting even tighter, those votes can make the difference. I am obviously not in favour of a "community electorate," however, pressure is so great on them that I can easily understand how it can affect their votes.
A lot of it starts with playing instruments and working with other people. Some of the new generation is doing it on computers and they don't have a clue as to how to play anything. That's probably one of the problems. They don't know how to make the melody, go through the chord changes. They're not starting from that same school of thought.
Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that secular people, losing touch with transcendence, would eventually lose a reference point from which to look down and judge themselves. In the end they would lose even the capacity to despise themselves. Thus, because of the 'death of God', they would confuse heaven with happiness, and happiness with health.
I think people are screw-ups, and even our greatest heroes are deeply flawed human beings. People make bad decisions for all the wrong reasons, and then somehow they'll do the right thing, and then somehow they'll save somebody, or they'll be compassionate. Horrible people can do wonderful things, and wonderful people can do horrible things.
We are living at a time where a handful of people have wealth beyond comprehension - huge yachts, jet planes, tens of billions of dollars, more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. But at the same time, millions of people are struggling to feed their families or put a roof over their heads or find the money to go to a doctor.
Successful companies create value by providing products or services their customers value more highly than available alternatives. They do this while consuming fewer resources, leaving more resources available to satisfy other needs in society. Value creation involves making people's lives better. It is contributing to prosperity in society.