Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is not hateful to say that an immoral action is sinful. On the contrary, the most compassionate thing we can do is help people to turn away from sin. To ignore another person's wrongful actions is a sign of apathy or indifference, while fraternal correction is motivated by love for that person's well-being, as can be seen by the fact that our Lord Jesus himself urged such correction. Indeed, the call to repentance is at the heart of the Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed, "The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the Good News" (Mark 1:15).
Photography, precisely because it can only be produced in the present and because it is based on what exists objectively before the camera, takes its place as the most satisfactory medium for registering objective life in all its aspects, and from this comes its documental value. If to this is added sensibility and understanding and, above all, a clear orientation as to the place it should have in the field of historical development, I believe that the result is something worthy of a place in social production, to which we should all contribute.
We do not force things on people. That's not how we want things to eventuate. That's not how we want things to happen. We have what we consider to be, anyway, a respect for our form of government, a constitutional republic. We believe in it. We want legitimate mandates. We win an election, we want it to be because the genuine majority of people who share our beliefs. We don't think we accomplish anything by forcing something on people. But that's not the way the left looks at this at all. They can only get what they want by forcing it on people.
Yes, I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as atheist some people will say, Don't you mean agnostic? I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one...etc., etc. It's easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal and that it's an opinion I hold seriously.
Investors are trying to work out some risk premiere that have some correspondence with actual risks. But they don't, they're not, they can't go very far that way, because the actual correspondence isn't really there in a lot of cases. So once people stop believing in these stories, and then the crash can come very, very quickly. They believe that house prices are correctly priced for some time and then suddenly they realized there's no real basis for that. But what is the correct price? We don't know that either. It's just that everything swings.
Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.
I had a massive heart attack, and in my belief that I was close to dying, I took the opportunity to teach my son about death. That lesson increased his faith in such a way that he completely accepted all the changes that life brings us. He learned that only the present exists. From that moment on, he began living in the present time, knowing that the future is just a possibility, and without believing all the opinions from the past. He understood that there are no guides, or masters. Each one of us is our own guru, and we can only save ourselves.
I was devastated. I'm still devastated to this day. When talent like that disappears in a flash, you can't believe it. You deny it. Max Roach, who, of course, played with him on all those EmArcy recordings, held a concert in Baltimore for Clifford long after Clifford died. Max was still disbelieving so many years later. The concert was supposed to bring closure. But Max was so outrageously emotional that day. He had quite a few eruptions and was very emotional about what had happened so many years earlier. Like everyone, he remained disbelieving.
... it is more than petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, and nothing but the wish to obtain some particular article of finery will ever induce them to submit to it.
I'm definitely excited by big ideas, both in what I write and what I read. Most days, reality is so mind-numbingly dull that I don't understand why someone would write strictly realistic stories, given the almost limitless freedom fiction provides. I don't see the point of making believe if you're not going to actually make believe: hang your ass out in the wind, push at every boundary, make almost unreasonable demands on your reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. This is dangerous, and prone to failure, but that's part of what makes it fun.
He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
The Russians succeeded, I believe, beyond their wildest expectations. Their first objective in the election was to sow discontent, discord, and disruption in our political life, and they have succeeded to a fare-thee-well. They have accelerated, amplified the polarization and the divisiveness in this country and they've undermined our democratic system. They wanted to create doubt in the minds of the public about our government and about our system; and they succeeded to a fare-thee-well. They've been emboldened and they will continue to do this.
Along the (writing) way accidents happen, detours get taken... But these are not "divine" accidents; I don't believe in those. I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions. The more you know about a book, the freer you can be to fool around. The less you know, the tighter you get.
Women believe -- or at least often pretend to believe -- that all our tenderness for them springs from desire; that we love them when we have not for a time enjoyed them, and dismiss them when we are sated, or to express it more precisely, exhausted. There is no truth in this idea, though it may be made to appear true. When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one.
I don't believe consumers want to see fuller-figured girls in ads. Because if they did they would refuse to buy the things they are seeing, and want to buy a different product. If people really want to see a change, they have to speak up on a daily basis to see that change. And I think that models who are suffering from an eating disorder, it is as sad to look at them as the person who is suffering from obesity or who is smoking outside their office or person who is drinking too much at the bar - everybody is suffering from something pretty much.
It is, I believe, justifiable to make the generalization that anything an organic chemist can synthesize can be made without him. All he does is increase the probability that given reactions will 'go.' So it is quite reasonable to assume that given sufficient time and proper conditions, nucleotides, amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids will arise by reactions that, though less probable, are as inevitable as those by which the organic chemist fulfills his predictions. So why not self-duplicating virus-like systems capable of further evolution?
Many of us understand giving, but some of us may still be confused about the meaning of forgiveness. Some people may go through life in a groveling mode, mistakenly believing they have to receive forgiveness from others. Forgiveness offers more than a reprieve granted to us by another person. True forgiveness is a process of giving up the false for the true and allows us to rid our thinking of rigid ideas. We can develop the flexibility to change our mind and our behavior patterns to higher and greater expressions and find new avenues to freedom.
Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts. Like the poet's image of a church bell that reveals its latent music only when struck, or a dragonfly that flames forth its beauty only in flight, so does the content of a human heart lie buried until action calls it forth. The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is and knowing that a thing is not.
I don't think school reform should be motivated by missionary zeal. I think it should be motivated by evidence of what works. I have been critical of Teach For America in the past but I think one of the things about their model that's interesting is that they're constantly looking at it and whether what they're doing works and reassessing their model, and making changes. So to the extent that I believe everyone in the education sector should be looking at evidence, reassessing, making tweaks to figure out what works, I think it's a positive model.
Alcohol is like anything else. It's only as bad as the person it's being poured into. If it's used to heighten an occasion, or to take an edge off stress, I don't see a problem. Trouble starts when you either lose control and let the bottle run you, or when you believe its promises of immortality. You realize that no matter how much you punish yourself, you always seem to wake up the next day. Pretty soon you're convinced that you will never die. When that happens I guess it is time to look for help before your life becomes one long, lost weekend.
I am not a strict constructionalist, believing that we seal our eternal progress by what we do here. It is my belief that God will save all of His children that he can: and while, if we live unrighteously here, we shall not go to the other side in the same status, so to speak, as those who lived righteously; nevertheless, the unrighteous will have their chance, and in the eons of the eternities that are to follow, they, too, may climb to the destinies to which they who are righteous and serve God, have climbed to those eternities that are to come.
I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.
I thought of myself as an atheist until I realized it was a belief, too. It's a shame everything has to have a label. I feel that if I was figuratively dropped on the Earth and there was a political line, I would be just left of center. The difference for me is that conservatives are more interested in property values and rights and free markets, and liberals are more interested in human rights. In the end, there are people who don't fit into the marketplace and are not equipped. I believe the government should step in where the free market fails.
We don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet-- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock--open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it-- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it.
And look, we have young people in this country who are thirty years old living with their parents. We have young people in this country who don't have jobs, who graduate from college and are fed the lie of meritocracy. "You get a degree, you get a job." That's not happening. We have young people who have become the Zero Generation: zero hope, zero employment, zero possibilities. Do we really believe that this young generation is going to stand by and not take note of an economic system that - however it calls itself - has completely betrayed them?
A famous, very often quoted phrase says: "That government is best, which governs least." I do not believe this to be a correct description of of the functions of a good government. Government ought to do all the things for which it is needed and for which it is established. Government ought to protect the individuals within the country against the violent and fraudulent attacks of gangsters, and it should defend the country against foreign enemies. These are the functions of government within a free system, within the system of the market economy.
I remember that one time Carl Sagan was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: "What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, Do something meaningful.
I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families.
I own no TV stations, or Radio Stations or Newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on, and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask, those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media, those of you who believe in true freedom, to publish this statement and to let people know what is happening. We have no voice, so you must be the voice of the voiceless.
Look at the way liberals name things. "Net neutrality." It's like Switzerland! They don't take sides, everybody's fair, everything's the same. It's not what it is. Net neutrality rules are anti-consumer and anti-competitive. By definition, liberals don't believe in competition, and you know that. Competition is the root of all evil, as far as leftists are concerned, 'cause there are winners and there are losers, and the losers are sad and disappointed, and that's unacceptable. So everything must be the same. Nobody can have more than anybody else.
I respect very much the role of the media in our society; I think they can be very, very helpful. They serve as a very useful check, sort of a watchdog over the actions of the government, and I respect that. But there is a competing interest, and that is the ability of prosecutors to get information that may be absolutely essential to assist them in the investigation of illegal wrongdoing. And so you've got these two competing interests. I believe that the current policy at the Department of Justice reflects a careful balancing of those interests.
For me, it was always clear that Toni Erdmann is more a film about what globalization, capitalism, does with private relationships much more than making a "political" film. It's more interesting to raise questions, because I don't feel in a position to "make a statement" with the film. Toni Erdmann comes from a completely different generation then his daughter, it's the post-war generation, they were very politically engaged. They raised their children with a lot of human worldviews, sent them out in the world believing in a world without borders.
"Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information." "I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand." "Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?" "I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person."
You must create the character's internal life. What do I mean by internal life? I mean the thoughts, feelings, memories, and inner decisions that may not be spoken. When we look into the eyes of actors giving fully realized performances, we can see them thinking. We're interested in what they're experiencing that may never be spoken, that quality of nonverbal expression - which is as much a part of the characters as breathing and as real as what they say and do. This is their internal life. It helps us believe in the characters and care about them.
During our journey there were two occasions that we celebrated by honoring someone's talent. Everyone is recognized by a special party, but it has nothing to do with age or birthdate - it is in recognition of uniqueness and contribution to life. They believe that the purpose for the passage of time is to allow a person to become better, wiser, to express more and more of one's beingness. So if you are a better person this year than last, and only you know that for certain, then you call for a party. When you say you are ready, everyone honors that.
When enough electrons within an atom get aligned and a critical mass is reached - as soon as you hit that hundredth monkey, as soon as you hit the one - you have phase transition, and all the rest of the electrons automatically make the change. My mission - what I teach and what I believe in - is that you just get yourself aligned with God-consciousness. If we teach enough people to do it - if enough of us ultimately get there - then we'll start electing leaders with this kind of consciousness. We'll start seeing kinds of shifts taking their place.
People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
When we believe or say we have been offended, we usually mean we feel insulted, mistreated, snubbed, or disrespected. And certainly clumsy, embarrassing, unprincipled, and mean-spirited things do occur in our interactions with other people that would allow us to take offense. However, it ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.
I don't think I've invented anything. Henry Ford didn't invent the car, and Steve Jobs didn't invent the cell phone, and he didn't invent the digital revolution, but he could adapt, put things together in creative ways. So I think in what we do there's a lot of "let's try it and sees," whether it's a new color or a new style. But we didn't invent cosmetics or lingerie. How we market them - style, color - those are the things that we do, but it isn't pure creation. It's putting together ideas. I truly believe there's nothing really new in the world.
I believe in a wall between church and state so high that no one can climb over it. When religion controls government, political liberty dies; and when government controls religion, religious liberty perishes. Every American has the constitutional right not to be taxed or have his tax money expended for the establishment of religion. For too long the issue of government aid to church related organizations has been a divisive force in our society and in the Congress. It has erected communication barriers among our religions and fostered intolerance.
Berkshire's whole record has been achieved without paying one ounce of attention to the efficient market theory in its hard form. And not one ounce of attention to the descendants of that idea, which came out of academic economics and went into corporate finance and morphed into such obscenities as the capital asset pricing model, which we also paid no attention to. I think you'd have to believe in the tooth fairy to believe that you could easily outperform the market by seven-percentage points per annum just by investing in high volatility stocks.
On the policy front, I just believe that Barack Obama was misguided. That he somehow sees this country as being in need of a drastic overhaul. What he tried to do actually hurt the country rather than helped it and the best example is Obamacare. It's a good idea to insure people who can't or won't buy insurance but you can't punish the working class to make it happen, which he did. Now everybody's paying higher premiums and more deductibles that's coming out of working people's pockets and that's one of the reasons that his legacy has been refuted.
I fully support your efforts to stamp out sexual assault in the United States military and believer that there is nothing in (Military Justice Improvement Act) that is inconsistent with the responsibility or authority of command. Your efforts in this regard have much broader implications that will actually strengthen the 'good order and discipline' of our military, which I believe accounts for much of the resistance that S967 is receiving...Protecting the victims of these abuses and restoring American values to our military culture is long overdue.
I believe the word "infidel" is not particular to any religion. I believe we are all created in the image of God, in fact, we are all God, or at one with God, at our deepest core essence. I think "infidel" refers to one who does not believe that God is none other than the Self. The "infidel" is the individual personality who identifies with the body and thoughts and not the Divine Indweller. Therefore we are all "infidels" save the sacred few who have transcended the notion of the limited self. The ancient mystics of all tradtitions have said this.
Normally we empower our demons by believing they are real and strong in themselves and have the power to destroy us. As we fight against them, they get stronger. But when we acknowledge them by discovering what they really need, and nurture them, our demons release their hold, and we find that they actually do not have power over us. By nurturing the shadow elements of our being with infinite generosity, we can access the state of luminous awareness and undermine ego. By feeding the demons, we resolve conflict and duality, finding our way to unity.
The most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.
I wish that Google would realize its own power in the cause of free speech. The debate has been often held about Google's role in acceding to the Chinese government's demands to censor search results. Google says that it is better to have a hampered internet than no internet at all. I believe that if the Chinese people were threatened with no Google, they might even rise up and demand free speech - free search and links - from their regime. Google lives and profits by free speech and must use its considerable power to become a better guardian of it.
Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there's enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, "It doesn't look good at all. Doesn't look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever." That's hope. I'm a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope.
We do believe in setting goals. We live by goals. In athletics we always have a goal. When we go to school, we have the goal of graduation and degrees. Our total existence is goal-oriented. We must have goals to make progress, encouraged by keeping records . . . as the swimmer or the jumper or the runner does . . . Progress is easier when it is timed, checked, and measured. . . .Goals are good. Laboring with a distant aim sets the mind in a higher key and puts us at our best. Goals should always be made to a point that will make us reach and strain.
Everybody's playing the game but nobody's rules are the same... Never make a promise or plan. Take a little love where you can... Never stay too long in your bed. Never lose your heart, use your head... Never take a stranger's advice. Never let a friend fool you twice... Never be the first to believe. Never be the last to deceive... Never leave a moment too soon. Never waste a hot afternoon... Never stay a minute too long. Don't forget the best will go wrong... Better learn to go it alone. Recognise you're out on your own. Nobody's on nobody's side.