Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity - it is, in a word, bourgeois - and so it attracts all of the same gripes.
Enjoy your life and be happy. Being happy is of the utmost importance. Success in anything is through happiness. More support of nature comes from being happy. Under all circumstances be happy, even if you have to force it a bit to change some long standing habits. Just think of any negativity that comes to you as a raindrop falling into the ocean of your bliss. You may not always have an ocean of bliss, but think that way anyway and it will help it come. Doubting is not blissful and does not create happiness. Be happy, healthy, and let all that love flow through your heart.
There are masses of people who need affordable housing in New York. I think that, politically, it is very difficult to give preference to artists over another group. Now, could there be an impressive envisioning process where developers would be asked to collaborate with urban designers? Maybe envision a large-scale development with local shops, dense housing, maybe a few towers, maybe a few mid-rise buildings, and art workshops in the mix? That would be great. I don't see a call for those proposals. But I think that it would not be outrageous to propose that kind of vision.
President Obama said, oh, we want to make insurance perfect for people, but he added all these regulatory mandates, made it too expensive. Young, healthy people didn't buy it, and the people remaining in the insurance pool were sicker and sicker. That's the adverse selection and the death spiral of Obamacare. And so really we do need to discuss the intricacies of what worked and what didn't work in Obamacare. And I think the better way to do this is to let individuals have the freedom to choose what kind of insurance is best for them. The government doesn't always know best.
Over the years, I've had fairly benign record companies who gave me a lot of rope, but in spite of that, there's still restrictions and expectations. It's nice to be at the cottage-industry size, which I think is kind of the business model of the age anyway. It's the way to be. The Internet makes a lot of that possible. Having a loyal fan base is also very useful to keep me operating; people can find your website, and the venues that you're playing at, the merchandise you have for sale, all that kind of stuff. It's great to be able to reach the audience in a more direct way.
One of the things that troubles me the most in life, that upsets all of us, is that we reach this world with the capability to be anything. But then life starts to confine us inside our small realities. And then, the shadow of those other possible lives stays to lurk us and you can't shake it off, since it was so easy, it'd have been so easy to lead another life. We make twenty thousand small choices a day, and maybe one of those choices is the one that will take us to a completely different life. If you stop to think about it, it is vertiginous, hypnotizing and distressing.
But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothin' would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know better'n that. I've thought about it a good deal. . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don't have no intentions of carvin' a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.
I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came.
But live you get the chance every night to rework it and change it and hone it. But then you get the false, weird oddness of being able to look at it and say: "Well that's weird, because last night they laughed at that and yet they didn't tonight. So what did I do? Nothing was different." You have that strange thing of being able to tell within five minutes what an audience is like. Very quickly an audience gets a personality and you start to think: "What is it about you all; you all hate it, don't you?" Then you come out and have friends in and they say: "It was brilliant!"
I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)
I think in Japan I think there is a lot of style and a lot of subcultures, but it will be interesting to see how much of them... how much of the people wearing those clothes are really expressing something about who they are or who they want to be and it will be very interesting to see, especially once you get there, once you get to a certain city like in Stockholm you really get to know the people a little bit and what they're saying through their clothes. It's more... To me I think it's much more interesting than just the clothes they're wearing or the length of the skirt.
Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.
I think the arrogance of people who think or actually are in the establishment, think they're part of it or actually are, they cannot help themselves, apparently. They take this guy, Trump, who is not a politician, in the career sense, and they plug him into their system and analyze what he does and what he says the way they analyze professional politicians and what they say and do, and they miss it. Which is not news. The news is they're not even getting close to understanding it yet. Despite the never-ending efforts on the part of people like me to help them figure it out.
People seem to think that my movies are so carefully coordinated and arranged - and in a lot of ways, they are - but every single time I make a movie, I feel that every director makes these choices. You make choices about your script, you make choices about your actors, and how you're going to stage it, and how you're going to shoot it, and what the costumes are going to be like, and in every single detail, you make that decision. And for me, what ends up happening is, I wind up surprised at the combination of all these ingredients. It never is anything like what I expected.
The federal government, state governments will not do without that tax revenue from tobacco no matter what. I've always thought it was one of the most contradictory setups that we have, because everything said publicly about the product is intended to besmirch it, impugn it, and do the same thing to the people that use it. And yet here's the government scoring, I mean, you want to talk about obscene profits, the government doesn't do a damn thing but stick its hand in. The government taxes tobacco at every stage. It taxes tobacco when the farmer's thinking about planting it.
If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage. I doubt that you would read a close friend's early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker. I doubt that you would pantomime sticking your finger down your throat. I think you might say something along the lines of, 'Good for you. We can work out some of the problems later, but for now, full steam ahead!
We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man himself, the wrongfulness of which is put down to their divergence from habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no argument or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, its protest against cruelty is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us - in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank.
I feel like there's not as many bands anymore. It's more like there's a front-person and a band supporting them, solo-type spirits that have a look, a vibe, a message, a voice and a style. I was talking about it with a journalist in Europe; he was like, "You're a democracy; everyone in the band does stuff." There's not a lot of bands I can think of that still have it so every member of the band has an equal say. I was like, dude, you're right. I can't really think of any right now. There might be one or two leaders in them, but there are not a lot of bands like that anymore.
One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them. Filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present : like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but I t felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between roof-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.
I think a persons life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the directors cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way. There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you’ve survived, or the minutes you’ve been stuck there. Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.
You are the witness of the three bodies: the gross, the subtle, and the causal, and of the three times: past, present and future, and also this void. In the story of the tenth man, when each of them counted and thought they were only nine, each one forgetting to count himself, there is a stage when they think one is missing and do not know who it is; and that corresponds to the void. We are so accustomed to the notion that all that we see around us is permanent and that we are this body, that when all this ceases to exist we imagine and fear that we also have ceased to exist.
The poverty we see in America is now too widespread, and too complex, for easy fixes. But I do think we can reimagine many of our institutions and can create new ones in ways that would be effective. We could, for example, create social insurance systems, similar to social security, such as that we went through in 2008-9. We could create a financial transaction tax, oil profit taxes and a fairer estate tax system, and we could plow much of the revenue raised from these into job training programs, into better education infrastructure, into an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.
I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.
What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without? We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble - all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure! So that we don't go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak. We can't stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
A friend of mine said to me not long ago, "Terry you are married to sorrow." I looked at him and said, "No, I am not married to sorrow, I just choose not to look away." To not avert our eyes to suffering is to trust the power of presence. Joy emerges through suffering. Suffering is a component of joy. Whether we are sitting with a loved one dying or witnessing dolphins side-by-side watching the oil burning in the Gulf of Mexico, to be present with the world is to be alive. I think of Rilke once again, "Beauty is the beginning of terror." We can breathe our way toward courage.
There's always something in new technology that promotes anxiety on the one hand, but also grieving on the other. With the internet, I think we can remember a time when people said "I don't use email," or "I'm not going to get email." I once had to do a piece on people who had never used the internet and refused to start and I found three people. But when I talked to them, they had used it, at some point or another. It's almost impossible to stay off the internet entirely. We feel as though we didn't get to make a decision. There's this new dawn and we all have to embrace it.
We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. ... The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.
Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the State of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with. I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.
I was just burnt out. I didn't like the music business and I didn't like me. There's an element of falseness about the whole thing. Even things like doing an interview. It's not as though we just met in the pub and are having a chat - it's part of a process. If you do it all day, every day for years, you end up thinking: 'Who the hell am I?' I was lucky enough to make some money, enough to let me kick back. It was a great experience and it was nice to have a couple of No.1s but the best thing about it was that the money I made allowed me to have freedom and choice in my life.
I typically don't use the distinction 'positive' and 'negative' liberty, because negative sounds bad and positive sounds good, and I don't think that the terminology ought to prejudice us one way or the other. So I think the more descriptive term is 'liberty rights' versus 'welfare rights'. So, liberty rights are freedom-of-action type rights, and welfare rights are rights-to-stuff, of various kinds...And, property rights are not rights-to-stuff. I think that's one of the key misunderstandings about property. Property rights are the rights to liberty within your jurisdiction.
I think the place maybe to watch with the greatest worry right at the moment, and to try to help the most, may be those parts of Africa around Somalia that are enduring a climate-caused and really record-breaking drought. It may be the greatest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II. And of course, where humanitarian crises happen, so do political instability. This is the world that we're building and building fast. And it's the world that people are trying somehow to slow down. Trying very hard to bring down this fossil fuel machine before it does any more damage.
Hillary Clinton was in rural America during the Iowa caucuses, but I think the nature of a campaign makes it more difficult once you become the candidate. There's a messaging opportunity here throughout, not just in the election season, but before the election, the opportunity to underscore what government is doing in a positive way in partnership with rural folks. I think it's a messaging issue. It's being there physically, talking to folks, listening to people, respecting and admiring what they do, and then making sure that they understand precisely what the partnership is.
What do you think would happen if we kissed right here, right now?" he asks, digging his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants, grinning right back at me. "I think it would cause a riot." "Well, you know me," he says, lowering his head towards me. "Causing a riot is what I do best." Santangelo approaches before Griggs gets any closer and pulls him away. "Are you guys insane?" he says, irritated. "It's called peaceful coexistence, Santangelo. You should try it and if it works we may sell the idea to the Israelis and Palestinians," I say, throwing his own words back at him.
I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.
A tobacco industry has been a fairly linear and predictable industry. You know what's going to happen every year. You know from time to time you are going to have a tax increase, you are going to have regulatory restriction, but, as it applies to everybody, I think we are doing very well. But now it's much more technology-driven. Competitors other than our traditional competitors can come in, whether legitimate or fly-by-night ones, and you have to anticipate all those things. The whole organization has to gear up to this new reality and these new competitive rules around it.
The majority of the people of the world today are unsane, not insane, unsane meaning having been exposed to methods of evaluation that have long rendered obsolete, our language in the future will change to a saner language where we have no argument in it, 'can there be such a language?' there is, when engineers talk to each other, it's not subject to interpretation, they use math, they use descriptive systems, if I interpreted what another engineer said in the way I think he meant it: you couldn't build bridges, dams, power transmission lines. The language has to have meaning
People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers – everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it´s actually just how you think. It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any. Because you are not even there.
From what I understand from talking with older friends and feminists, I think that once I enter the workforce and start to think about marriage and having children, my gender will probably eclipse my feminist identity in terms of marginalization. Discrimination in terms of hiring and in the workplace are still real according to statistics. I also think, as a feminist, figuring out what a relationship based on true and complete equality is will be a challenge. But hopefully by the time I'm dealing with those issues feminists will have made great progress in all of those areas.
It's good to be happy and tell us how cool your life is and how awesome you are on social media. It inspires other people to be happy, too. But a lot of times, people are trying to be happy in the wrong ways - with money or with different things that are not true happiness. It's leading people down a rabbit hole that actually doesn't exist. So people think like, "Yo, once I get this money and these cars and stuff, I'ma be so happy." But that's not true. And I feel like that's why it's very important to educate people on different things while you are actually on social media.
Personally I don't think there's any real intrinsic difference between comic books, movies, theatre, novels. I know there's sure to be some differences of some sorts. I've worked on novels, films, and video games, and in an adaptation, I guess one of the issues is that I have to be in love with the thing I'm adapting before I do it. So that can cause a problem. You can be too scared of it. You could be too reverential. But at the same time you want to try to capture this thing that you're obsessed by. You're fixated for a reason. What's the reason? You try to get ahold of it.
So, what people are actually left with to spend is maybe 25 to 30% of their income on goods and services, after paying taxes and after paying the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate). Whether it's housing insurance or mortgage insurance. So there's an idea of distracting people. Don't think of your condition. Think of how the overall economy is doing. But don't think of the economy as an overall unit. Think of the stock market as the economy. Think of the rich people as the economy. Look at the yachts that are made. Somebody's living a lot better. Couldn't it be you?
What goes through one's head when Disney asked for 52 more shows? I remember seeing that in the supplemental features...When they first said "52" I literally laughed, I thought they were kidding. They said, "Well, how many do you think could do?" And I said, "Well, we've got 6 scripts in the works, so 6 obviously we could do. We did 13 last year, I think we could do 13 this year without a problem." I said, "If we really pushed it, I think we could do 18." And they said, "What about 52?" I started laughing but they were serious and eventually they did get the 52 episode order.
I think that we’re a culture that runs away from death, for good reason. Nobody really wants to think about the fact that we’re going to be lifeless food for worms in a coffin someday. But at the same time, I feel like knowing that you’re going to die can be an incredibly rewarding, powerful knowledge. It inspires us to live in ways that we wouldn’t if we were ignorant. I feel like that has inspired me to care about every breath. For me it’s not a morbid curiosity, it’s just wanting to make sure that every moment I have here on the Earth while I am breathing is accounted for.
That is the brilliant thing about the millennials. They're not obsessing about, "Hey, there is not going to be a job for me" - they're trying to take advantage of how good a life they can have without having to create so much nominal income. Income is there to create quality of life, but you can share your car and get where you want to go, and you can travel the world by couch surfing. I think they're taking advantage of deflationary forces to improve their life while not maybe having to chase the nominal money that was needed to buy a whole car, a whole house, a whole couch.
One thing that's really interesting is not only the magnitude of the recent immigration into this country, but also its distribution and its investment in the country. About 9.3 percent of the population is now foreign-born [announced by the Census Bureau at over 10 percent a few days later]. What's really surprising is how well distributed those population groups are. Historically, we see new immigrants primarily on the coast and in a few big cities. I think the data are going to show a much wider distribution of the new population groups than we've experienced historically.
40, 50 years ago, Americans - the majority of Americans did not want to accept these Vietnamese refugees who they saw as completely foreign. Now there are new foreigners - Syrians and other people from the Middle East, people of Muslim backgrounds. And the sense among many Americans is, well, these people are completely different from us, and they're not like the Vietnamese who are much more assimilable. And I think that's very, very doubtful. I think that the majority of these new foreigners, if given the opportunity, will be able to assimilate and deal with American culture.
Although it is tempting to think of these natural landscapes as reflecting a stability in climactic and geologic forces, long periods of climactic and geophysical stability actually result in a rundown of the energy available to ecosystems and people. Geologically young regions with recent mountain building and volcanism tend to be much more biologically productive and have supported large populations of people despite their vulnerability to natural disasters. Geologically old regions (like most of Australia) tend to have low biological productivity and supported fewer people.
I think that we don't have, here in the Middle East or in Africa, as much threat to our physical and economic livelihood as women in other parts of the world. But the continuum is the same. The pressures on women to fit into a certain image of a good Muslim girl is the same. The controls and rules are the same, but there are different degrees of it. So, in America, a father will threaten a daughter that he will disown her if she marries the American boyfriend and in Pakistan she faces acid thrown on her face. The power dynamic is the same, it just expresses itself differently.
Of course, you can never watch something like somebody else watches something like you, but nonetheless, you have to try. So I think on camera you learn a lot about how much the camera does for you, which is what is the great luxury of movie acting. Or acting whether it's TV or movies or whatever it is, that the camera's really such a gift because there's so much that it sees and does if you're willing to just be open and expose yourself and all of that. So you also learn what doesn't matter. And sometimes when you think about things, you think things matter that don't matter.
Historians will look back on this era and how the Internet changed what we value, what we consider art, the way we think, the way we define what it means to be human. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling describes the changes that occurred between about 1850 and 1920, due to the Industrial Revolution and the resulting migration of people from small communities to relative anonymity in cities. Because of that paradigm shift, ideas about what it means to be an individual underwent a transformation that leeched into all areas. Art, psychology, history, marriage, gender.