Bad movies: they can be tatty classics of crazed ineptitude, like Edward D. Wood's 'Glen or Glenda' and 'Plan 9 from Outer Space,' or big-budget misfires like the 1987 'Ishtar,' a would-be comedy that sent Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman on a Hope-Crosby Road to Dystopia.

Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.

Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.

I think one of the things we have in this modern, individualistic age is a recognition that happiness can look very different for very different people. Happiness is not necessarily about how much money you make, happiness isn't necessarily about these aspects of your life.

Trump is playing to an audience of people who think of themselves less as Republicans and more as Americans - moderates, conservatives, and independents - who feel that the Republican Party has completely ignored their priorities and beliefs and insulted them along the way.

Broadly speaking, in the past few years, we've more than doubled the editorial staff [in Mother Jones], as part of ramping up daily operations that have resulted in huge gains in audience, a slew of awards, new multimedia endeavors, and of course scoops like the 47 percent.

I worked in fashion forecasting and I think that helps in being an editor because I love to know what's next, and I like to predict. I like to predict the trends going into the shows and normally I've organized all of our stories before we go. Fashion is my second language.

As if our happiness, our good fortune, might rub off, contestants ask us for a light: they brush up against us in the halls, pull strands of hair off our clothing. Whenever we leave our bed, our room -- not often -- two or three are sure to be lurking just outside our door.

The (U.K.) government's thesis that the countryside of upland and coastal Britain is 'worth sacrificing to save the planet' is an insult to science, economics and politics. But the greatest insult is to aesthetics. The trouble is that aesthetics has no way of answering back.

The function of the church for both young and old is not to give us on Sundays certain kinds of experiences different from experiences of the every day. The function of the church is rather to teach us how to put religious and ethical qualities into all kinds of experiences.

I was involved in an organization called the White House Project, and the woman who ran it introduced me to Bloomberg. I told them, 'You can pay me zero dollars, but I need you to give me a TV show to anchor, and I need you to hire someone to teach me where the cameras are.'

We are forever looking outside ourselves, seeking approval and striving to impress others. But living to please others is a poor substitute for self-love, for no matter how family and friends may adore us, they can never satisfy our visceral need to love and honor ourselves.

If the government decides to put your life under a microscope, do you think it won't find something? I suspect there's not an adult in the country who would walk away totally unscathed if every aspect of his or her life were investigated the way Stewart's ImClone trading was.

Throughout the history of America, we have been a nation driven by the idea of the frontier - a place where law was slim and liberty was enormous, where you could make your way in the world based on your own ambition and abilities, not fenced in by the limitations of society.

'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,' while not nearly the masterpiece proclaimed by many critics, is certainly a fascinating cross-species: a big-budget summer action fantasy with a sylvan, indie-film vibe, and a war movie that dares ask its audience to root for the peacemakers.

Ask Bond-watchers of a certain age about the six actors who have slipped into Bond's Savile Row suits in the Broccoli franchise, and they might say it's really Connery and five other guys - since he, being first and being Sean, stamped the role with his sulfurous masculinity.

The religious way is the deep way, the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles of the heart of every phenomenon. The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships; that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feelings of kinship.

We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.

Once the cry and the cause of a generation of progressives to make America safer, fairer and cleaner, 'regulation' is now a dirty word in our politics. Even Democrats are quick to talk about cutting regulations; Republicans hate them with - how to put it? - evangelical fervor.

There is no appeasing Putin. Frankly, there is no directly stopping him, either. It is only possible to raise the costs to him of his war, including the military costs. If we won'€™t provide military materiel to Ukraine now, we deserve the contempt with which Putin regards us.

You know the fairy-tale drill, especially from the Disney versions: the heroines endure awful stuff in rites of passage that lead to a joyous resolution of, usually, marriage to a prince. 'Into the Woods' follows that template, then asks, 'What happens after Happy Ever After?'

Like 'God's Not Dead,' the fundamentalist Christian movie that has become a popular hit, 'Transcendence' is essentially a dramatized debate. And as 'God's Not Dead' stacks the rhetorical cards for the Deity's existence, the Pfister film eventually hangs back with the Luddites.

Leonardo Fibonacci, the great 13th century Italian mathematician (1175-1250) created the 'Fibonacci sequence' to explain behavior in nature mathematically. History has it that the first question he posed was how many rabbits would be created in one year starting with one pair.

No wizard has ever made himself useful by magic, or, if they've tried, they've only made matters worse. No wizard ever stopped a war or mended a fence. It's better that they stay in their marshes, out of the way of worldly folk like farmers and soldiers and merchants and kings.

A war on Al-Qaeda could have been won with a decisive military strike in Tora Bora during December 2001, but American fighters at Tora Bora were refused requests for more forces when they trapped Al-Qaeda there; the Pentagon was busy husbanding resources for the Iraqi invasion.

If we can help an advertiser refine a message so it works for our consumers, we should be doing that, but at the same time, you never want to do it by confusing the customer about what the experience is. If we fail in that regard, we do our brand and our customers a disservice.

I think part of my success as an editor came from never worrying about a fact, a cause, an atmosphere. It was me—projecting to the public. That was my job. I think I always had a perfectly clear view of what was possible for the public. Give ‘em what they never knew they wanted.

Intellectuals and celebrities venerated monsters like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, & Ho Chi Minh. The New Left of the 1960s didn't have a change of heart, just a change of icons from Stalin to third world tyrants. The homicidal and sadistic Che Guevara is still held up as a hero.

One thing I know from personal experience, judges hate it when parties talk publicly about their cases. There are a lot of things about our criminal legal system that need to be changed, and this is just one of them. Prosecutors know how to play the press. Most defendants don't.

Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my job to protect it in any way.

I think all of us in the commentary business need to take a deep breath. And it can't be true that every single week the world is ending in some different way. And this presidency [of Donald Trump] will be judged like all presidencies - on the state of the economy and by events.

The government is promoting bad behavior... do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages... This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage? President Obama are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgage! It's a moral hazard

There are lots of things that I will probably never experience in this life. Military combat. Being dictator of a small central American country. Dunking a basketball. Being a famous rock star. Or walking on Mars. But one thing I have been, and will always be, is an entrepreneur.

How many mothers have emerged from a family trip to a Disney movie and been obliged to explain the facts of death to their sobbing young? A conservative estimate: the tens of millions, since the studio's first animated feature, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' premiered in 1937.

I personally think money in politics on any level is horrible. I'd like to see a set amount and have every candidate spend it. Have it be completely transparent. But actually getting to that spot, as we have learned through all the legislation over the decades, is very difficult.

We also had a beautiful feature where the writer used the story of two mentally ill relatives, one of whom killed his dad, to explore the history of how we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, only to re-institutionalize them - but in jails and prisons. There's much more to come.

I wonder about prisoners. They're told, "You are free, you are innocent, you can go anywhere." I'm sure they usually feel nothing. They don't burst into tears or hysterics or joy or "I told you so." It's nothing. To be on the straight path isn't a bloody thing. It's just ordinary.

The payouts for starting a business are just terrible when you account for risk. A tiny minority of entrepreneurs ever get rich. And the majority of entrepreneurs would probably make far more money, and have more stable personal relationships, if they just worked for someone else.

Sometimes I am convinced there is nothing wrong with this country that couldn't be cured by the magical implantation of ethical standards on us all - leaders and followers. Until that becomes doable, the Center for Public Integrity is just about the best thing we have going for us.

I think it's good that [my granddaughter] here because I lost my parents and now it's great that there's a new generation. And she's taught me new things that I've forgotten. Like, when you're on holiday and see what it's like to see a shell or go into the water for the first time.

Now [in China] within the framework of socialism - which is really social welfare in a social democratic framework - all they want to do is to get the kind of economic growth of the capitalist world. It can't be done. It creates the same kind of problems as in the capitalist world.

I think it's wrong for the government to subpoena records from journalists involved in national-security reporting (particularly since I do it myself). I do believe it has a chilling effect on the ability to gather news about potential abuses masked by inappropriate classification.

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

'Rogue One' does not feel like a 'Star Wars' movie. There are no scrolling yellow letters. There is no classic John Williams score. It feels like a movie of a different type set in the 'Star Wars' universe, a movie where there is no magic to save you. It is not a movie for children.

He [Donald Trump] is got no ethics when it comes to business and can they turn this story line, talk to his white working class base and say, he`s hired illegal immigrants. He doesn`t look out for you. He`s taking your kids money at Trump University and he is being accused of fraud.

Obamacare is socialism? Nope - as insurance companies vie to sell new policies, competition within private industry is growing rapidly, with the number of participating insurers growing by 26 percent between 2014 and 2015, and the number of products they offer growing by 66 percent.

Book publishing was never a heaven "run by editors", and it is by no means today a hell "run by accountants." If our "sole interest" was "instant profit," not only would we never do any number of the things we actually do every day, we probably wouldn't be in book publishing at all.

We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'

The Allies had made war on Napoleon as a tyrant and an oppressor of nations; yet once they had him out of the way, they did him the favor of representing him as the torch bearer of the French Revolution. They did him the further favor of repeating his mistakes and besting him at them.

Plenty of people detested Michael Jackson before his death wiped away the world's collective memory. Timberlake was originally dismissed as just another boy-bander. Legions have joined in a 'Hate Anne Hathaway' movement. Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Kristen Bell, even Mozart had haters.

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