Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There were dozens of people who walked through the Holy Land claiming to be the Messiah, curing the sick, exorcising demons, challenging Rome, gathering followers. In a way, there's nothing unique about what Jesus did. In fact, many of these so-called false Messiahs we know by name.
Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.
I'm drawn to the unconventional because I've been drawn unconventionally. I believe that I'm supposed to topple over these false images of what's idealistically beautiful. Because, of course, these intangible qualities are very attractive to women. Sincerity. Sense of humor. Success.
When I do an impression of someone or when I am pretending to be someone else, something freaky happens: I feel the person I am mimicking behind my eyeballs. Their head is sitting perfectly inside mine, helping me project a false self out on to the world. And it's not always a choice.
Poor leaders motivate those following them with false promises of promotions, success, and a great tomorrow but rarely deliver on those promises. Leaders who do this can be manipulative and often hold the goals and aspirations of their followers hostage in order to get them to comply.
It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?
In America, after 9/11, and after the death of bin Laden, and after two wars, one of them fought, a lot of people think, on false pretenses, and definitely post the Patriot Act, there are a lot of these questions about what can we do to our citizens in order to prevent the next attack.
The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.
As a dramatist, you have 200 choices at every fork in the road. But the audience will reject it if you make the wrong choice, if they feel you are trying to shape the character in a way that suits you. It rings false immediately. People can sense when you're being cynical or schematic.
The most important thing is to help the team to come in front of the goal with one-two passes, I drop down, or I give them space, because for defenders, it's always difficult to have a false nine because they don't have a direct player against them, so they don't know exactly what to do.
First of all, this whole idea of this one percent versus the 99 percent, it's a false statistic. There's nobody that is wealthy saying, let's go get the people that aren't. First of all, there's no versus. He's creating a false class warfare in a country where there is no class structure.
It's a false choice to say we either have job safety or job growth. It's a false choice to suggest that the only way for a business to survive is to make sure workers have low wages and little or no benefits. There are ample models across this country where we've demonstrated the contrary.
I do not want to admit to the world that I can be a bad person. It is just that I don't want anyone to have false expectations. Moviemaking is a harsh, volatile business, and unless you can be ruthless, too, there's a good chance that you are going to disappear off the scene pretty quickly.
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm - not all - that religion used to fill.
My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.
Everybody walks around talking about, 'Sam Allardyce's style is not good enough, he doesn't play the right way' and so on and so forth and it is a massive problem for me. People believe it. You believe the false lies, the false implications. Football does that - it believes that lie sometimes.
The perpetrators of the actual bad stuff that does real and lasting harm to people, like leakage of industrial chemicals into water systems, seem to get not so much as a second glance; the bloviation from media pundits and think tanks creates false problems that waste time and energy debunking.
Trust your gut instinct over spreadsheets. There are too many variables in the real world that you simply can't put into a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets spit out results from your inexact assumptions and give you a false sense of security. In most cases, your heart and gut are still your best guide.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
I have been in football a long time, and Wayne Rooney has been in football a long time. He would regard me as someone who is very false if I ever said to him, 'Your place is guaranteed.' He would not expect it, and I would be very upset anyway if anyone asked me to give them a guarantee of a place.
I lost my front tooth in rugby league when a fat guy from Bellevue Hill kicked me in the face as I got up from a tackle to mark him. I made this decision not to cap the tooth because I thought it was false. But I didn't make any movies as a teenager, and I had a very hard time with girls and stuff.
I definitely am very secure with my body and my likes and dislikes and the imperfections that some might call flaws. I'm like, 'Those are my thighs; it's just what it is.' I think a lot of that has to do also with... women being a lot more vocal about the fact that, you know, being flawless is false.
My dad had always been a big decaf coffee drinker. But my mom had always been more of a tea drinker. So I grew up around a lot of tea. And I also really love tea. But I'm not one of those people who has ever felt the need to choose between coffee and tea. I think that is a completely false dichotomy.
Sense perceptions can be and often are false and deceptive, however real they may appear to us. Where there is realization outside the senses, it is infallible. It is proved not by extraneous evidence but in the transformed conduct and character of those who have felt the real presence of God within.
As women, we're presented this false choice that is either our children or our work. But I don't think I fully understood the paradox until I had a child. I bring my son to work and let other parents do the same. I am very intentional about the workplace that I create, and my son is a big part of that.
I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I don't believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too old now; it's from another century, it's not for today.
Trump may not like the fact that 20-plus anonymous sources provided the 'Times' with an unflattering portrait of his campaign, but that doesn't make it 'false.' Of course, Trump had no problem with news outlets running with his made-up claim in 2011 that President Obama 'doesn't have a birth certificate.'
Race is used, by all of us, in the most manipulative ways, is often force-fit and reduced to something it isn't, to something that gives us a sense of comfort, a false one. Many of us thought - needed to feel - the whole business was 'settled.' But it's not, never has been. Laws have only taken us so far.
We have a generation of women who think that they can just have IVF, and everything will be fine. The odds are against you once you start having IVF, and the odds are against you over the age of 35. And to pretend that it's easy to have a baby in your 40s or 50s is - it's just selling women a false dream.
I'd say the best way to train someone is to remember that you have two ears and one mouth, and use them in that ratio. That's hard to do, and ultimately what we've learned is how many false positives you get from listening to what someone says they're going to do instead of observing what they actually do.
The crazy thing is a lot of people - a lot of men, if I'm just speaking for myself - don't really start thinking about the effect of hyper-masculinity and false definitions of what it means to be a man until you get married or until you have kids. Because then, all of sudden, you have something to protect.
When a person tests positive for HIV, it is not a test for the virus itself but for antibodies to the virus, and the test is not able to distinguish between HIV antibodies and a multitude of other antibodies. Many conditions can lead to a false positive result, including flu shots, hepatitis, and pregnancy.
The implication is that this basic idea we have that we are controlled by our genes is false. It's an idea that turns us into victims. I'm saying we are the creators of our situation. The genes are merely the blueprints. We are the contractors, and we can adjust those blueprints. And we can even rewrite them.
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
Extreme narcissists exaggerate their achievements and talents, and so Trump has spent his life building up a false image of himself - not just for others, but for himself, to protect his deeply fragile ego. He lies endlessly, not just in the way sociopaths do, which is to con others, but also to delude himself.
The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn't green - the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It's that the greenness doesn't mean what it seems. It doesn't encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne.
The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like 'General Relativity still governing planetary orbits' or 'Phlogiston theory remains false'? By the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline.
As we were developing 'Umbral', and I was delving into the mythology and legends, I had a sudden realisation. 'Wasteland' is about people who fervently believe new myths and legends, but they turn out to be false; whereas 'Umbral' is about people who reject ancient myths and legends, but they turn out to be true!
This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.
My biggest false steps have actually been when I tried to do very different projects. I found I was getting people saying, 'Why does Whit Stillman think he can do a film about blacks in early '60s Jamaica? Or the Chinese and the cultural revolution?' Those were the two biggest failures I had getting off the ground.
If one has the answers to all the questions - that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.
I've played a lot of villains. The villains are always fun because you can just go fractionally bigger than life. It's always a grey area because you don't want to end up mustache-twirling and making them a little false, but you always get to play a little more, whereas the lead guy has to be a little more straight.
Certainly, those of us in the entertainment industry, we are part of creating fear in people - 'fear' for me stands for 'false evidence appearing real.' We create fantasy, and in certain ways that's wonderful because it allows people to escape. But it can suck people into wanting to achieve something that isn't real.
Communism counts its opportunities in terms of decades - not of weeks. Its means of aggression consist not only of nuclear weapons and missiles with enormous boosters, and not only of spies, agents and terrorists, but of great masses of men and women, deluded by a common ideology which inspires them with a false hope.
I say I'm the only serious comedian in the presidential race. And I'd like to take this opportunity to ask both Romney and Obama to debate me. Because I think that both of those guys - I think that the American people are being given a false choice, because the choice between the lesser of two evils is a false choice.
It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
I went back to Dallas for a little while to finish my short film 'Rusty Forkblade.' It was not the instant success I thought it was going to be. There's a false narrative that if you make a short film right after senior year, you'll be plucked out to make a feature length film, and the rest is history. I didn't do that.
Some folks hesitate to seize additional strength because they think it wrong or dangerous to be a powerful individual. Somehow they have acquired the false notion that tyranny or dictatorship or cruelty are the outcomes of a powerful personality. These characteristics are not power. They are weaknesses disguised as power.
Every community has crime and violence; it's a part of being human. This idea that black communities are more violent than others is just false. But black folks fight the hardest for our communities. Before governments do, before other people do, we're the first ones to show up. We are the first ones to fight for our lives.
The reason why China forecasting has such a poor track record is that Westerners constantly invoke the model and experience of the West to explain China, and it is a false prophet. Until we start trying to understand China on its own terms, rather than as a Western-style nation in the making, we will continue to get it wrong.