Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason — instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.
People think that the government honors and respects us, and that they're actually going to come in and help people in need, but in reality it's really just a bunch of red tape, and through the power of language they can really make it seem like they're going to do a lot when they aren't going to do anything but filter money back into their own pockets.
Cinema has changed the world. If you go to the beginning of the cinema, you can see that the world started meeting other worlds. It was extraordinary. We saw how other people were living and thinking. How they were sad or happy. We also saw the body - naked or half-naked people, which was prohibited everywhere by religions. This was extremely important.
It's terrifying to think about all things that were awful for you. But for me, sharing all of them was so satisfying, because people read them and get to go, "Oh, okay, I don't have to feel so shitty about that," or maybe even, "Why was I feeling so shitty about that? I should own that and learn from that." Those are the sorts of stories I want to tell.
People dressing up as you is always a weird experience. Or sometimes you get the odd person who genuinely believes that you are your character. I've had that happen where I'm like, "No. No. No. Call me Sophie. It's OK." And they are like, "No my lady. I can't!" And it's really weird. But some people just find it difficult to separate that kind of thing.
We have an international system. We all profit from it. Trade profits from it. Peace. We can travel around the world because of it. And part of that system is certain ideas, the certain ideas you can't invade other countries for no reason. You can't commit genocide. You can't - rogue regimes can't have nuclear weapons, and you can't gas your own people.
The word patriotism, or its equivalents and derivations, is upon everyone's lips at the present time. It is a magic word which is thought by most people to cover any multitude of sins. To be patriotic in whatever cause is tantamount to being virtuous, while no worse charge can be brought against a man in popular estimation than to say he is unpatriotic.
We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us in the words which were used of old — “Shall I speak for thee to the King or the Captain of the host?” — we should reply with the Shunamite woman: “Nay, Sir, for we dwell among our own people.”
My whole life, people have been saying, "Why are you so angry?" and I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. After I saw myself at the MTV Awards, I realized, Wow, I do kind of come off a bit intense. I wasn't upset at MTV at all - I didn't mean to come off that way. But I think it's good if I appeared a bit angry. People are too complacent.
When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.
The person who conveys, 'I am nothing. Make me something,' may all his life have people trying to answer his hidden plea, but their answer will be in terms of, 'I am trying to make you something because you are nothing,' and, thus, the insult will be embedded in the response. It will be heard just as clearly as the attempt to help. And it will be hated.
There are three kinds of people and three kinds of richness: - people who want to have, to collect - people who want action, work and labor - people who want to be The real richness is in be-ness. People can take all that you have, all that you collected. People can stop your labor, or an accident can stop you. When you are, you never lose what you are.
Exorcists always need to distinguish demonic possessions from mental or psychiatric disorders, and they use three symptoms to identify people as possessed. First, those people have the ability to see hidden sacred objects, which they always want removed. Second, they have an extraordinary physical strength. And third, they show an aversion to the sacred
It's cool when people ask me about my gold medal and they say it will last forever. I will try to promote skiing and show everyone it's not just about competition. It's about having fun with your friends in the snow. I want to bring people with less opportunities to the snow, try to use my gold medal to support programs to bring more people to the snow.
We have to prepare for what life could become in 40 years. We need to outline what is possible and what is impossible with the non-renewable resources of the Earth. What role will technological improvement play? Taking all this into account, what kind of life can we produce in the best way for 10 billion people? That's a problem that needs to be solved.
I had a very depressing response because I realized that these were my own people, these were Negroes throwing eggs at me. I'm concerned about the fact that maybe all of us have contributed to this by not working harder to get rid of the conditions, the poverty, the social isolation, and all of the conditions that cause individuals to respond like this.
I've had pretty much the same crew for all the films that I've made, and I've managed to have really nice, calm, funny people. That is a big part of it, a family feeling of warmth and finding something interesting and making a platform for them to perform. It's a very difficult job, acting, in that it's totally counterintuitive to how we are brought up.
God is angry with man. Unless we believe and repent we shall all be damned. It is impossible, indeed, for its advocates even to say this without instantly contradicting themselves. Their doctrine frightens them. They explain in various ways that a great many people will be saved without believing, and that eternal damnation is not eternal nor damnation.
When I teach a class I often give the assignment: Photograph someone you love. I ask people to do this so they have a subject about whom they have feelings, a subject that is more than a model, or an object, or a shape, or an idea. In this way, they can judge the result not only by its technical success, but also by how well it describes their feelings.
To be silent. In hopes of not offending, in hopes of being accepted. But what happened to people who never spoke, never raised their voices? Kept everything inside? Gamache knew what happened. Everything they swallowed, every word, thought, feeling rattled around inside, hollowing the person out. And into that chasm they stuffed their words, their rage.
If you have become bitter and sour, it is because when God gave you a blessing you hoarded it. Yet if you had poured it out to Him, you would have been the sweetest person on earth. If you are always keeping blessings to yourself and never learning to pour out anything “to the Lord,” other people will never have their vision of God expanded through you.
I don't think a lot of people have been privy to understanding that there's this talent in hip-hop all over the earth that's just as good. It's just that everything out of the U.S. proclaims to be the best, especially L.A. and New York, being that they're the nerve centers and media capitals of the most predominantly media-emitting country in the world.
I understand perfectly well why the Catholic Church preaches against abortion. But it shouldn't be the purpose of the Catholic Church to prevent non-Catholics from having abortions if they feel that abortions are morally acceptable. They can certainly only argue for what they believe to be right in the court of public opinion and try to persuade people.
If you let other people do some of the work that we ask ourselves to do, if you allow for the fact that we are ourselves dependent on and distributed over and in a way made up out of the world and processes around us then we can explain certain questions that we otherwise cannot explain and moreover we discover that we are not aliens in a strange world.
I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.
Regarding some of the super powers that I reference, like walking on water, I haven't seen people do that, but once you get into the science, a lot of it starts to make a lot of sense, for example, like people being able to read your mind. It's very logical, because words are just a grosser form of thought, and thought is just a grosser form of feeling.
Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence...To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.
Brothers and sisters, white people will come in to chastise us. But since we are no longer forsaken, and are the people of God, God will answer whatever they do of evil to us. I'm warning the government and I am warning General James Mattis, and all those who would kill us outside of the law of justice, that the God of justice will pay you back in full.
Francis Coppola was very generous. We got paid a lot of money and he saw us every day, took us out every night. It was just a lot. Richard Gere was an absolute gentleman. Gregory Hines. You know, I worked with some giants and they were just so smooth. And it was the '80s. That's when people had a lot of money and it was okay to to hang out and be crazy.
Every night I get many letters, and after every talk I get many questions from people who say, "I want to change things. What can I do?" I never hear these questions from peasants in southern Colombia or Kurds in southeastern Turkey under miserable repression or anybody who is suffering. They don't ask what they can do; they tell you what they're doing.
Confidence is key. You're not going to leave your money with me unless you're confident I'm going to give it back to you. And at this point, when treasury bills, seven day treasury bills at 1/20th of one percent, it's not because people want to earn 1/20th of one percent, it's because they trust the fact the treasury will give it back to them next week.
Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.
I always try to be ironistic in everything I do. I love people who understand humor and who live through humor. So, of course, I was not too serious covering such things as Motörhead or "Black Magic Woman" by Santana. But I was serious enough about Led Zeppelin and the Celtic song "Wild Mountain Thyme." In my life, serious and humor are always together.
In other words, first we must call people to communion with God, to intimacy with God, to a sense of belonging. Most people are lost, confused, alienated. They suffer and struggle immensely in relationships. We have to proclaim loudly and clearly in our actions and in our words that God loves us that we belong to him. That's a call to the mystical life.
Donald Trump has laid out a priority to remove criminal aliens, remove people that have overstayed their visas. And - and once we have accomplished all of that, which will - which will strengthen our economy, strengthen the rule of law in the country and make our communities safer once the criminal aliens are out, then we'll deal with those that remain.
All designed tools and objects are sort of extensions of human abilities, and they do tend to make life richer for us. But, an awful lot of designs, especially in this country, make life a lot more inconvenient. I'm thinking, for instance, of high-fidelity units that have so many switches and toggles and buttons and things that they confuse most people.
There's so many women that need to be inspired, encouraged to go after their dreams, their goals, their aspirations. Because we all have that champion within us. It really is about your mindset and having the tools that you need, surrounding yourself with the right people, people who have been able to achieve some of the things that you want to achieve.
The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling.
Some artists are definitely trying to do different styles. Some, not a lot. But even from what you've seen [of] Outkast, Kanye West, and Lil' Wayne, and different people expressing their way of evolving in hip-hop. In the evolution of hip-hop, they're doing different things. And you've seen hip-hop have more of a global presence and impact on the world.
It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."
The Ph.D. system was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it's fine. But the trouble is that it's become a kind of a meal ticket - you can't get a job if you don't have a Ph.D.
The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That I think is valuable. In terms of actually tweeting myself, I have just lost enthusiasm for it. Maybe I'll do some of it this week to tell people about the PEN Festival and encourage them to show up.
People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.
The secret is to find what you love to do.I mean, I tell the students look for the job that you would take if you didn't need a job. I mean, it's that simple. And I was lucky enough to find it very early in life. And then the second thing is to have people around you that make feel good every day, and make you a better person than you otherwise would be.
What disturbs or assures us about race has very little to do with blood or biology. Race is about how you use language, understand your heritage, interpret your history, identify with your kin, figure out what your meaning and worth to a society that places values on you beyond your control. And it's also about what people see you as - or take you to be.
Not too many people work in a job where, waiting out there are three or four hundred people who are paid to tear apart what you've done. And often they are brighter than you are, or they know more about the subject than you do, or they wish they had written a book themselves, or done a lot better. Or they just don't like it! And you have to live with it.
What could define God, [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God. They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.
In a way, forgiving is only for the brave. It is for those people who are willing to confront their pain, accept themselves as permanently changed, and make difficult choices. Forgivers are not content to be stuck in a quagmire. They reject the possibility that the rest of their lives will be determined by the unjust and injurious acts of another person.
I'd heard rumors about Oliver Stone before we went to work on and I don't get it. To me, he's one of the most sensitive directors. He is just fascinated by why people act in the ways that they do. His movies are an excuse to explore that idea, and he wants to work with people who are as passionate about exploring it as he is. So we got along brilliantly.