Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In a world where millions of human beings live in extreme poverty, die of malnutrition and lack medical care, where pandemics continue to kill, it is imperative to pursue good faith disarmament negotiations and to shift budgets away from weapons production, war-mongering, surveillance of private persons and devote available resources to address global challenges including humanitarian relief, environmental protection, climate change mitigation and adaptation, prevention of pandemics, and the development of a green economy.
The single most damaging misconception about strategy is that it is a set of financial performance goals. The so-called "strategies" created by many managements are nothing more than three-to-five year financial performance forecasts. They are then labeled "strategy" and shipped off to the board of directors which goes through the motions of discussing how big the numbers are. Strategy is not your aspirations. Strategy is concerned with how you will arrange your actions and resources to punch through the challenges you face.
My direction as a person working in film has been to never get comfortable with anything I was doing. At the time that I decided to do action films, people were telling me, "Well, you can't do it. You're not that type. It's not going to work." And so obviously that made me think, "Well, that's not comfortable. Maybe I should try it. What can I do with it?" So I did that, and I'm glad I did it. I'll probably do it again, and I did other kinds of things that seemed like challenges for me, because I like being on the high wire.
Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success...whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood.
We need to deal with three things that are important: first, we need a very deep reconsideration of how we are dealing with the economy. Second, there must be a very deep reconsideration of our way of life. We cannot simply adopt American-style consumer culture. To Islamize that is to de-Islamize Islam.Thirdly, it is important for us to understand the economy and the environment are common challenges for everyone. This is where the singularity of Islamic principles needs to join the universal values that we share with others.
Every single human being is creative and maximizing that creativity is critical to happiness and economic growth. Economic growth is driven by creativity, so if we want to increase it, we have to tap into the creativity of everyone. That's what makes me optimistic. For the first time in human history, the basic logic of our economy dictates that further economic development requires the further development and use of human creative capabilities. The great challenge of our time is to find ways to tap into every human's creativity.
For me, one of the highlights of being in the private equity world is that you need to learn a lot and very quickly about different businesses. So it's always a continuing learning experience where you can apply what you know, of course, by way of judgment and by way of numerical analysis. You're always investing in new businesses, which is a learning experience in itself. I think that is a wonderful thing and I think it makes for intellectual challenge and for continued personal growth. That, for me, is the highlight of this job.
We need to be clear that there is no such thing as giving up one's privilege to be 'outside' the system. ONE IS ALWAYS IN THE SYSTEM. The only question is whether one is part of the system in a way which challenges or strengthens the status quo. Privilege is not something I take and which I therefore have the option of not taking. It is something that society gives me and unless I change the institutions which give it to me, they will continue to give it, and I will continue to have it, however noble and egalitarian my intentions.
The failure of the first Barack Obama administration to really deliver on a new War on Poverty and a new language to explain these societal challenges in some ways provided the fuel that led to the Occupy Movement a few years later. And, while Occupy was a somewhat transitory phenomenon, many of the activist groups that emerged during this period are still out there, and still working on reshaping the political debate around taxes, around welfare, around government assistance to the poor, around debt relief for students, and so on.
All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you'll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience, and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being “left alone,” is to remain quiet, unthreatening, and compliant.
Then the challenge is, once you left brain it and build it, then when you're on stage you have to know it so well that you can get lost in it. I don't want to be onstage looking like a robot, I want to be at the end of the day very emotional and what feels like someone being up there rather than reciting things. That's always the challenge, to analyze and then somehow lose yourself in something you absolutely know backwards and forwards. And nothing's going to surprise you, but you have to be surprised by it and let it surprise you.
This election will determine whether we're a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged. This is reality. You know it, they know it, I know it, and pretty much the whole world knows it. The establishment and their media enablers wield control over this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed as sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed.
I must say that in my own mind, I think what's important is for us, as a society, to radically reduce the consumption of meat. This is more important than some fraction of us become moral saints and become vegetarians so it would be much better if we would reduce meat consumption by three quarters of each of us as an individuals would only eat one-quarter as much meat as we do now then that half of the population should become vegetarian. We should see this as a collective challenge rather than an issue about individual, moral period.
Will we go explore? Absolutely. That's what humans have been doing since we left the caves in Ethiopia. Why? Because this is part of our nature. We're curious. We want to push the envelope. That will never stop. We will see people on Mars, hopefully in our lifetime. My hope is that the endeavour is so large, so complex, so technically challenging, so demanding and so uplifting, that it will be done with a consortium of nations. I hope the people who do set foot on Mars will do so for all mankind, and not just one nation in particular.
There has to be a kind of grassroots push, a movement, as it were, against the inherent isolationism of American capitalism as practiced in the publishing industry. There need to be grants and government support and a few publishers, mainstream and independent, who are not afraid to challenge American readership. We need to build a network of translators, publishers and readers. We hope that our annual anthology might provide an upsurge in interest for European fiction and then, as we publish it every year, become a habit to many readers.
The more people I meet, the more cultures I start to embrace, the more people I open myself up to - it's a growing process I'm excited about. But it's also a challenge for me, to be at this level and still be able to connect with somebody who's living that everyday life. At first it was something I struggled with, because everything was moving so fast. I didn't know how to digest it. The best thing I did was go back to the city of Compton, to touch the people who I grew up with and tell them the stories of the people I met around the world.
With a full century of contrary proof in our possession and despite our demonstrated capacity for cooperative teamwork, some among us seem to accept the shibboleth of an unbridgeable gap between those who hire and those who are employed. We miserably fail to challenge the lie that what is good for management is necessarily bad for labor; that for one side to profit, the other must be depressed. Such distorted doctrine is false and foreign to the American scene where common ideals and purpose permit us a common approach toward the common good.
The thing about acting is even if you get technically more skilled at what you do, every time you begin a film or a play you're terrified. You don't know if you're going to pull it off. Every film and every story has its own set of challenges. I've never felt like, oh yeah, that's it, nailed it! You can never sit and rest. That's why it's such an exciting job. It's beginning again every time you begin again. New story, new character, new place, new time, new director. It's like moving to a different planet and trying to figure out how to live there.
I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.
My problem is, whether it's for emotion or for the talents that a character has to have in a role, I find it very difficult to not take on a challenge. I need to say, "Okay, enough, take the easy road." But the easy road for me is not - it might just come out coincidentally. I wouldn't ever choose a movie because it's easy. I might choose a movie because I feel like being funny, or I feel like being able to do something that is perhaps dramatic, but to a lesser degree. Because I like switching it up, basically, not because I would take the easier road.
For ten years, I wrote regular columns about science for women's magazines, and to my knowledge I'm the only person in the world who can say that. This has no kudos in either the science-writing world or the academic world, but it's one of the most challenging things I've ever done. It's much harder to write about cosmology for a magazine like Vogue than for the New York Times, which I've also written for, because you have to imagine that on the page opposite there'll be an advertisement for eyeliner, or an article about the latest trends in skirt length.
When you're in pajamas that are sagging in the ass because you've got a battery pack that's weighing them down, and covered in 2,000 LEDs, and your face has 150 black dots on it, and you're probably standing in six-inch heels, it is a big challenge to imagine that you're the master of the universe when the rest of your cast members are laughing their ass off at you. So there's no question that there was a very difficult task that I had, but it wasn't living up to somebody else's expectations of the story. I was just trying to do the screenplay that was written.
You ask why London has to 'stand for' anything. One response is that in fact it always inevitably does. One could say at the moment it stands for a complex mix of multiculturalism and financial power. Interestingly, that is a political mix of progressive and oppressive. What I'm arguing is simply that we should take responsibility for the effects of 'our place' around the world. To take responsibility for our embeddedness. If you don't want to, so be it. It does demand an imaginative engagement with our planetary interdependence and that can be quite challenging.
Some people love magic for the right reasons: They love to experience wonder. They don't want to know how it works. In this day and age, we know how everything works. We can Google anything and the answer is never really far away. Magic is a break from that where you get to enjoy mystery. And then there's the people who watch the trick but don't want to enjoy it because they want to figure it out and they feel like I'm challenging their intelligence, which I'm not doing. Those people are hell-bent on not enjoying magic and probably not enjoying their lives either.
For me, something that's been always really important to me, that's also really served me well in hindsight, is doing different things, trying to cross different genres, and dipping my toes into comedy and drama and action here and there. Fortunately, as I've been working, the industry has also changed where you're able to dip your toes into different mediums, where it's not just independent film and studio film, but now you've got TV, and you're able to do all these different things. For me, it's just a matter of continually pushing myself and challenging myself.
When people come to you with problems or challenges, don't automatically solve them. As a mama bear, you want to take care of your cubs, so you tend to be protective and insulate them against all those things. But if you keep solving problems for your people, they don't learn how to actually solve problems for themselves, and it doesn't scale. Make sure that when people come in with challenges and problems, the first thing you're doing is actually putting it back to them and saying: "What do you think we should do about it? How do you think we should approach this?".
I think the challenge of climate change in particular is the challenge for us to create and produce new norms for a new kind of world. And that's why I think as important as the issue of climate change is, it's even more important than it seems because if we can't evolve very quickly, new norms to deal with issues like climate change, we're not going to be able to survive in the kind of world we've created. So I think, really, the whole nature of democracy, of governance, of global community and of solving the kinds of problems of the 21st Century are really at stake.
I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.
You're always choosing the start point and the end point. And almost by definition, the most interesting period is where something happens, as a result of which something is different at the end. And so to me, the idea that you know everything about a character at the beginning is sort of ridiculous. Something has to be revealed. I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something.
I know a lot of Christians who have been in ministry and walked away from it because the pressure can be too great. And there's a lot of Christians who at the same time would say like well why does God do [certain things]. What I found is Christians regardless of whatever their experience is who trust God more and learn to go through those moments of challenge and persevere. Usually the end result is an experience and interaction with the Holy Spirit that's greater than it was previously. And for me, there is no pursuit that I desire or enjoy more than that interaction.
Working in the Arctic is definitely colder, but not necessarily harder. There were different challenges. And in many ways, Chasing Coral was even more of a struggle for me personally. And more of a struggle to capture. Glaciers right now are changing very consistently. The interesting thing that we realized with Chasing Coral was that the corals reefs. They can go from living to dead in two months. And if you're not there at the right time to capture that before and after, you just show up and it's a dead reef. So it was a challenge to be at the right place at the right time.
One of the challenges is to create an equally positive, satisfying sense of femininity and feminine identity in a different way so that there are things you're saying yes to and satisfying that urge that your daughter has to be assert her girlness. The surface level of the culture, and really several inches into it, makes that very hard to do. I hate to put another thing on parents' plates. But the culture is very intentional in what it's telling your daughter and what it's telling you about the message of femininity. And if you're not intentional and conscious back, you lose.
It's easy to see why conservatives would be salivating at the thought of a Hillary primary challenge. Presidents who face serious primary challenges—Ford, Carter, Bush I—almost always lose. The last president who lost reelection without a serious primary challenge, by contrast, was Herbert Hoover. But in truth, the chances that Obama will face a primary challenge are vanishingly slim, and the chances that he will lose reelection only slightly higher. No wonder conservatives are fantasizing about Hillary Clinton taking down Barack Obama. If she doesn't, it's unlikely they will.
At first the, only subconsciously apprehended, approaching confluences of complex events make themselves known intuitively within the intellectual weather. Then comes a gradually awakening consciousness of the presence of new families of differentiating-out challenging concepts of every day prominence. It is with these randomly patterning families of separate concepts that evolution is about to deal integratively. As a now specific unitary problem it may be disposed of effectively when and if that unified problem becomes "adequately stated" and thereby comprehensibly solvable.
The space station mission was kind of the culmination of all of my experience of being a NASA Astronaut, so it had brought all of my previous experience into play. I had to learn the Russian language to a fluent level so that I could function as the co-pilot of the Soyuz Spacecraft that we flew up and back from the space station. And then the challenge of being the Commander of the whole expedition, a six and a-half month flight aboard the international space station. I felt the burden of the whole mission on my shoulders, which was fine, and fortunately everything did go well.
Women face a lot of challenges every day - we have to stand firm in our walk and our intentions - but there are times when that weight feels too heavy, feels like a load that I just can't bear that day. I try to work through that in my art, whatever medium that might be. My live performance is based around the color red, and all the things that communicates as a woman to the world - fiery, really vocal, present, almost a kind of stubborn color - and redefining it as being very complex. Being able to express that complexity, I'm getting a lot better at that the older I've gotten.
The G20 was established as a forum to discuss, first and foremost, world economic issues. If we load it with... Of course, politics affects economic processes, this is obvious, but if we bring some squabbles, or not squabbles, rather, some matters that are really important but relate purely to world politics, we will overload the G20 agenda and instead of addressing such issues as finance, structural economic reforms, tax evasion and so forth, we will engage in endless debates concerning the Syrian crisis or some other global challenges, of which there are many, or the Middle East problem.
One of the central challenges for global conversation today is to find ways of getting to understand very different views about gender and sexuality. But we should start by recognizing that these issues are subjct to disputation within every society as well as across societies. We need a global conversation that recognizes that we have these very different views. Next, try to agree on fundamental rights: things we think every person is entitled to. Finally, if we're convinced that what a government or a society elsewhere is doing to some people is badly wrong and the conversation gets nowhere.
This world belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?