Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People were always pointing the finger at the fast food industry. And I was a big fan of personal responsibility - you know, no one is forcing you to eat. We're not geese being stuffed with corn.
I think there is a lot to be said for the respect that our parents had for children, and for my brothers and sisters and me at a very young age, and for exposing them to the world and what's out there.
Nixon tried to wrap the Soviet Union into a web of agreements that would constrain its behavior. What happened is that many people lost faith in that approach, not the least because of how the Soviets handled it.
In the U.S., we've given corporations all the powers and freedoms of an individual but with none of the responsibility. Corporations need to be giving back to their communities just as much as they're taking away.
I think that there are certain guns that, of course, I don't know who needs a machine gun, personally. But I think rifles and things like that are fine. I think that in the wrong hand is when a gun becomes a problem.
I'm not somebody who comes in with a whole outline, and says, "Here's the movie we're going to make." That's not what a documentary is for me. I think a documentary is about capturing events as they unfold in real time.
You come downstairs, turn off the TV, and then and your son says, 'Daddy, I want to get that wrestling set, and all the pieces are sold separately.' The minute he quotes a commercial verbatim, that's when he's had enough TV.
I never aspire to be objective because I don't believe in objectivity. It's important to be truthful, and it's important to make sure that the audience has a solid sense of what the expectation should be of a particular film.
I'm making entertainment, but I'm making art. This is my art. Hopefully, it's profitable, hopefully it makes money, but at the end of the day I want it to be remembered for its artistic value as well as its entertainment value.
I was starting to become impotent through this diet and couldn't perform. How many people who are taking the little blue pill, if they started to change what they are eating most of the time, could change the way their sex life is?
It's scary to watch someone you love go into the center of himself and confront his fears, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of going insane. You have to fail a little, die a little, go insane a little, to come out the other side.
When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival.
The thing is that my father's story helps to communicate what was at stake with my mother, and my mother and father had so much a partnership that his story is integral to her story, as her story is to his - really, her story can't be told without his story.
I feel like throughout history we've heard bullshit from politicians, but now we're at the perfect intersection of technology and entertainment where we can, in real time, produce something that holds people accountable. That's an exciting time to be living in.
Ultimately, if you want to make movies, you've got to want to make movies every day, when people are paying you to make movies and when they're not, because you're going to get a lot more no's on this business, no matter what it is, than you are going to get yeses.
I've been doing documentaries for about 25 years and want to continue to do that, but I love the idea of working in a different medium. Advertising pushes the envelope creatively, and there is some really great work being done right now, so I'm excited to jump into it.
More than a billion adults worldwide are now overweight - and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese. Childhood obesity is already epidemic in some areas and on the rise in others. Worldwide, an estimated 17.6 million children under five are said to be overweight.
Sometimes we want to engage in a war for financial reasons, for strategic reasons, for moral reasons, for all sorts of reasons, and it's important when we're making that decision to remind ourselves of what happens to the people on the front lines when we start this process.
The U.S. has represented throughout its history a commitment to human rights and the law - shining a light on what happened at Abu Ghraib exposes our departure from this long-term commitment. It does not, however, excuse the atrocities carried about by Saddam Hussein and others.
The world - and America - has been defined by people who haven't necessarily abided by the laws and the rules. Civil disobedience is part of our nation's history and has redirected our country in many instances, from the feminist movement to the Civil Rights movement and beyond.
I think it can be really powerful, and one of the reasons I love making films is I do feel they can reach beyond the statistics and the numbers and the complexities of a particular issue and really highlight the humanity in a way that an article or newspaper story might not be able to do.
Despite his deeply-held ideology, Reagan was willing to talk to Gorbachev. He willing to do business with him. We should realize that engaging with adversaries is often one of our great strengths. As long as we use the engagement to stand up for the things we care about, there is no harm in talking.
I've always been interested in Vietnam, feel it's a seminal event in our nation's history, and have explored it over the years - but I hadn't been interested in doing a documentary about it. I felt there had been a lot done about Vietnam, and didn't know if I could add anything new to the discussion.
There's a great op-ed piece by Kurt Johnson, who runs The List Project, that I recommend everyone read. He was talking about how he's been trying to get out of Iraq who were our allies, who are now subject to torture, and their families are being killed because of their alliance to the United States.
With the growing recognition of the value of herbs, it is surely time to examine the professional therapeutic use of these herbs. There are profound changes happening in the American culture and herbal medicine, 'green medicine,' is playing an ever-increasing role in people's experience of this transformation.
I'm not sure I would make a direct connection between having press attention as a young person and being interested in the media as an older person. I came to it more organically, coming from a family of Irish Catholic storytellers. Storytelling is a pastime and important part of my family's history and culture.
In fact we put so many things in our mouths we constantly have to be reminded what not to eat. Look at that little package of silicon gel that's inside your sneakers. It says DO NOT EAT for a reason. Somewhere sometime some genius bought a pair of sneakers and said Ooooh look. They give you free mints with the shoes
I have no doubt that aggressively going after wrongdoing can result in real improvement. Fewer wrongdoers in city government means more honest employees; it means better city services; it means more efficient government. And punishing wrongdoing can have a strong ripple effect that deters others from going down the wrong path.
In fact, the same difficulties faced by Reagan in the 1980-s are still there [in the beginning of 21 century]: how do you hit a bullet with a bullet? The technology is getting better, but it still is focused on one interceptor knocking down one missile. In war, there would be many more challenges, more chaos, more uncertainty.
I enjoy telling these stories that I ultimately think get a disservice on a lot of network television. I enjoy getting people to change their perspective. I enjoy pushing myself into learning and understanding things from a very different point of view. It's scary to do that. It's scary to kind of put yourself in somebody else's position.
Many of the soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and have not been supported by the government when they've requested psychological help. Of course, the prisoners continue to suffer physically and psychologically. Much needs to be done - torture has a negative impact on everyone it touches, including us, Americans, as a nation.
I think we had an incredible opportunity to capitalize on that right up to Libya. I think we've made a step toward something that might be a mistake. I personally believe Saddam Hussein and Ghadafi are not good guys by any judgement, and there are ways to deal with it beyond what we did. Once you decide to attack, it paints an ill-conceived picture.
Scholars have been arguing for a long time whether the Soviet Union could have been turned into some kind of social democracy. I doubt it myself. I think what Gorbachev didn't quite understand, until it was too late, is that his efforts at change unleashed new, certrifical forces he hadn't counted on. He opened the door a crack and a huge wind blew it open.
By what you decide to put on your body, for example, you're already making a personal judgement. That's an incredible thing that happens...we set our own standards even before we walk out the door. Most of the time, those standards are self insulting. Most of the time we belittle ourselves, because we can't have the things we think we're suppose to have. That's what we've bought into.
People standing up and saying, 'This isn't right,' is certainly a quality I admire in specific circumstances. There are people who do that and have a different set of politics, and then I don't necessarily agree with what they're doing and why they're doing it. But the act in and of itself of saying something is wrong and standing up for what they think is right is something I generally admire.
My mother did an incredible job - one, of just being a great mom, but two, of instilling a tremendous amount of empathy into me as a young man, as a young person. My mom was kind of this collector of people; throughout my childhood, it didn't matter who you were. She was a high school counselor and then a junior high counselor, and she didn't just counsel students, she counseled other teachers and administrators and coaches.
One of my beliefs as a filmmaker is that if you can make somebody laugh, you can make them listen. With laughter, you can get somebody's guard down, you can open them up to listening to you. They don't feel like they're being preached to or talked down to. I think it helps, it makes really hard to understand information a little more accessible and palatable. And at the end of the day, it makes a movie a little more fun. It doesn't feel so heavy handed.
I was thinking about time, how on a movie set the shot is maintained in the same time no matter how many takes and hours pass. Reflectors and lights are added, footprints are smoothed away, so that there are no telltale clues as the day wears on. When the shot is finished and the plugs are pulled, time seems to leap forward in a matter of seconds. Perhaps making movies is a step toward being able to move backward and forward and in and out of linear time.
I think that I'm pretty much who you see onscreen. Are there times when I ask questions of people and have a sense of what their answer may be? Sure. I think that you can't deny that. But you still want to hear from that person, even though you may anticipate what they may say. I am as natural right now as I am when I talk to somebody in the Middle East. It's just trying to be a real person to them. So long as I can be as honest with myself when I make a movie like that, I can continue to be honest with you.
I think people need to see on both sides. Seeing how the people in the Palestinian Territories can't move around - it's a maze now, with the wall, the road blocks and everything else. It takes you hours to get from one person's house to your job or to a friend or even to the hospital if someone's hurt. Then you go into Israel and see in Tel Aviv, where they have 12-18 bomb threats a day, which are real. It completely disrupts their life. Or Sderot where bombs are falling daily from the sky fired by Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.