World Quotes - Page 531

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I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

I've never really understood how people cannot value the future, or think that the world is going down a fast slippery slope of degradation. No, I don't think so; this is just what it's going to take to wake us up, and allow us to do what our ancestors did. You know, our ancestors brought us here by tooth and claw. A lot of people perished, a lot of pre-humans perished. Life has never been easy. Why should it be easy for us?

It's like in biological evolution: The population will evolve, even though individuals can't. The same thing happens in the corporate world: The population of business units within corporations evolves, even though individual business units can't. That's because the capabilities of business units reside in their processes and their values, and by their very nature, processes and values are inflexible and meant not to change.

I'm extremely proud of what I have achieved. I've travelled around the world twice, went from rolling quarters for cigarettes, balling my eyes out, wondering what I was going to do after losing three million dollars, to being very financially comfortable, to buying a Mercedes G Wagon to being able to get whatever I want and living in a beautiful apartment in West Hollywood, furnished exactly how I want it. Life is incredible.

In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty-hazard and novelty-which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God.

A great factory with the machinery all working and revolving with absolute and rhythmic regularity and with the men all driven by one impulse, and moving in unison as though a constituent part of the mighty machine, is one of the most inspiring examples of directed force that the world knows. I have rarely seen the face of a mechanic in the action of creation which was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.

In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action.

We human beings are not only the beneficiaries but also the stewards of other creatures. Thanks to our bodies, God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement. Let us not leave in our wake a swatch of destruction and death which will affect our own lives and those of future generations.

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel.

The people who seem to us to be a very tiny elite, far off and mysterious, actually live in a fairly big world. The way they look at the planet is like they're looking at an index card covered in supply routes. We protestors had imagined ourselves this huge threat. But we were at best bemusing. To the extent that the people inside did care, it was almost like we were paying them a compliment-it reinforced their sense of power.

We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.

No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.

How do we address network neutrality when the whole world is connected? How do we ensure governments don't purloin this for political purposes? It's already happening. Look at Russia on the American election. How do we protect data security when everyone's connected? Look what happened with the ransomware. How do we deal with cybercrime and cyberterrorism and the disruptions of the system? And we're seeing this every week now.

There are no general-interest media that all of us can tap into. I'm not a good person to talk to about social media. I just avoid it. I'm suspicious also of the culture of venting. But the bigger question is, How can we in this media world have a genuine civic conversation? I mean, look at Franklin Roosevelt. He had these radio talks that all Americans listened to, and there was a common civic conversation that came out of it.

What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days.

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?

Is it not a thing most abominable, that God who feeds so many mouths, should be held in such low esteem by me, that I will not trust him to feed me? Yea, that a guilder, thirty-eight cents, should be valued more highly than God, who pours out his treasures everywhere in rich profusion. For the world is full of God and his works. He is everywhere present with his gifts, and yet we will not trust in him, nor accept his visitation.

It is the Fourth Instinct (the spirit - RJ) that urges us to exceed ourselves ... by awakening our intuitive selves, and striving to be all that we were intended to be. It takes us beyond self-centeredness and enables us to resist the combined forces of indifference and meaninglessness. It awakens us to a sense of responsibility for those most in need of our society as well as for that world that future generations will inherit.

The 'gatekeepers' became a term of revile. But when you think about the flow of information, I personally value immensely the calibration a news organ, whether it's on the web or in print, brings to the floodwaters of information. I haven't the time to read all the dispatches of the Associated Press, for example. It's fantastic what they put out, it's extremely good, from all over the world. I like when someone acts as a filter.

Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that sets you all straight again.

It seems like the world is so fast to move its interest to someone else. When I think about filmmakers and actresses that I have admired my whole life, I've admired their entire body of work. I have admired what they began with and what they're doing now. And now I feel like there's such a weird pressure to find the new face. I don't get it at all. I want to see women evolve. I want to see a body of work. I want to see all of it.

The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers.

I've always been an escapist, I guess, and I spend so much time on the internet absorbing ideas and processing the horrors of the world that when I'm actually going to read for pleasure, it's always something ridiculous about a dragon. I'm so saturated with the injustice and torment of the real world that it's really hard for me to get myself to read anything that's even set in our universe, because I'm exhausted by our universe.

[Y]ou weren't born with a talent for witchcraft: it didn't come easily; you worked hard at it because you wanted it. You forced the world to give it to you, no matter the price, and the price is and always will be high... People say you don't find witchcraft; witchcraft finds you. But you've found it, even if at the time you didn't know what it was you were finding, and you grabbed it by its scrawny neck and made it work for you.

I was a teenager when General Zia took power in the Pakistan; I was in my twenties when I went there during the late 1980s and I saw then not only the novel punishments that he was introducing - because they were novel, and this is again something that's very important to understand, it's only in the last thirty, forty years, since 1979 in fact, that these penalties have been revived anywhere in the world apart from Saudi Arabia.

Then there is that other appeal, the stronger one, of spending, during certain parts of the year, a ten- or twelve- hour working day with bees, which are, when all is said and done, simply a bunch of bugs. But spending my days in close and intimate contact with creatures who are structured so differently from humans, and who get on with life in such a different way, is like being a visitor in an alien but ineffably engaging world.

I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis.

Perceiving how things are is a mode of exploring how things appear. How they appear is, however, an aspect of how they are. To explore appearance is thus to explore the environment, the world. To discover how things are, from how they appear, is to discover an order or pattern in their appearance. The process of perceiving, of finding out how things are, is a process of meeting the world; it is an activity of skillful exploration.

You feel the communion of the collective consciousness in that moment when you're on stage doing something and the audience is absolutely with you. And the audience becomes a collective entity as well. They come in from separate places and socio-economic backgrounds, and places across the world and days that they've had, and then they come together and they become one collective thing, and experience something in a collective way.

In my view, the Western model of influencing the development of third world countries is doomed to failure. The West does not understand how to deal with states that no longer have any authority and are threatened by dissolution. Their efforts failed in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. They are simply not capable of promoting the indigenous economy. Many billions of dollars flooded into Afghanistan, but without any significant effect.

We know the Russians did everything they could to be involved in our campaign. We know that what they're doing around the world right now, whether it be in France or other parts of the world. They'll do anything they can to disrupt any type of a freedom, if you will, or a democracy, or an involvement where there's an orderly transfer of power. That's not for them. They're going to do what they can. We have to make sure we stop it.

Forget being the best of anything. That's the fruit of the action, and you do the work -they say- for the doing, not the fruit. You can never really know how it's gonna turn out in the world but you know if you enjoy doing it. And ideas start flowing and you start getting, you know, excited about stuff. Then you're having a great time in the doing and that's what it's all about. If you don't enjoy the doing, then do something else.

Imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein, who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. The idea is to try to help change the Middle East. Part of the reason we went into Iraq was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction.

It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

While [Domald] Trump chose a running mate, [Mike] Pence, who wrote [a letter to an Indianapolis newspaper] about how women shouldn't work because it's bad for the family. So we're really facing such a stark contrast between the candidates. Not to mention the vulgarity that Trump has been spouting about women for his entire life and continues to throughout his campaign. It's just a different world that we'd be living in [if he won].

The apparent multiplication of gods is bewildering at the first glance, but you soon discover that they are the same GOD. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible gods. In fact Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the most profound Methodist, and crudest idolater, are equally at home with it.

To paraphrase Karl Marx, the great Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the streets of Copenhagen...Capitalism is the specter, almost nobody wants to mention it...Socialism, the other specter Karl Marx spoke about, which walks here too, rather it is like a counter-specter. Socialism, this is the direction, this is the path to save the planet, I don't have the least doubt. Capitalism is the road to hell, to the destruction of the world.

We have to recognize that the reason that the global order that we've enjoyed and almost take for granted over the last several years exists is that after World War II, the United States and its allies tried to build an antidote to what they had seen between World War I and World War II. There, they'd seen protectionism, beggar-thy-neighbor trading policies, so they said, we'll build an open international economy. And they did that.

See that your chief study be about heart, that there God's image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.

"Acoustic ecologist" is basically a fancy name for someone who tries to become a better listener. Not just listening to those thoughts, ideas, and productions of human intention, but listening to places - whether it's an urban environment, residential, industrial, or even the farthest corner of the world, in one of our last great quiet places where we can listen to the pure sounds of nature without any human-caused noise intrusions.

In the '80s, the world I was living in wasn't this world of consumption. There wasn't that much to buy, really. Actually I'm still struck by that. There's not an awful lot of stuff I want. Somebody quotes Diogenes, who's walking around saying, "How many things there are in the marketplace of which Diogenes has no need." I always feel that. Except of course when you're living in Venice, California and you see all these lovely houses!

God warned Israel, "And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it" (Ex. 20:25). To pollute something is to make it ordinary. God insists that any approach crafted by human ingenuity will produce a worship system just like all the pagan systems in the world. In other words, it will be common or profane - just like everyone else's paganism.

Even very recently, the elders could say: 'You know, I have been young and you never have been old.' But today's young people can reply: 'You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be.' ... the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.

We need to realize that we are observers and creators, and in every moment that we are observing our world, we're constantly remaking it at every instant, and that we have to understand too that every last thought we have, every judgment we hold, is having an effect whether it's conscious or not. So of course the most important thing of all is to be aware of what we are thinking and to realize it has an effect on the world around us.

Scripture is so counter culture. Christ was counter culture. It's not like we're supposed to be weird or anything, but as we grow closer to Christ, we won't care about the things of the world as much. As a believer, you're just going to be countercultural. That's the way its always been and it will always continue to be that way. That's why it's important for us as believers to encourage other believers that it's okay to be that way.

I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful — being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.

There's a great Albert Camus quote: 'The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.' When I first re-emerged, I was embarrassed to walk down the street. People would come up and say, 'I heard you were dead!' But I had to remind myself that a lot of the stuff I went through was pretty brutal. I'm definitely thankful that some of the rough patches are behind me.

Everybody was cratered after Copenhagen. If the movie had worked the way that it should have, if it had been scripted by Holywood, the world would have come together and addressed the biggest problem it ever had faced and delegates would have embraced each other, and it all would have been a good happy scene instead of the complete farce and debacle that it turned into - maybe in certain ways, an absolute low point for human diplomacy.

Maybe I had something to do with that. I don't know. But public don't believe press. If you were straight and really told it like it is, as Howard Cosell used to say, right? Of course, he had some questions also. But, if you were straight, I would be your biggest booster. I would be your biggest fan in the world, including bad stories about me. But if you go - as an example, you're CNN. I mean, it's story after story after story is bad.

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