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I, personally, think Trump improved pretty dramatically and certainly changed pretty dramatically over the last hundred days. He's less of the populist. He's more of the corporatist. He's less incompetent. He's trying to at least turn toward people who can put a decision-making process. And he's trying to adjust to the job. And so whatever one thinks of him, he is certainly a learning creature.
I understand that actors lose their looks, they change over time, but people don't lose their talent. I think that, as people get older and the people who make the decisions get older, they don't like hiring people much older than them because it reminds them of their fathers, and they don't like telling people older than them what to do. It makes them uncomfortable. I think that happens a lot.
The thing you fail to grasp is that people are not basically good. We are basically selfish. We shove and clamour and cry for adoration, and beat down everyone else to get it. Life is a competition of prattling peacocks enraptured in inane mating rituals. But for all our effacing and self-importance, we are all slaves to what we fear most. You have so very much to learn. Here. Let me teach you.
God has identified himself with the hungry, the sick, the naked, the homeless; hunger not only for bread, but for love, for care, to be somebody to someone; nakedness, not for clothing only, but nakedness of that compassion that very few people give to the unknown; homelessness, not only just for a shelter made from stone but for that homelessness that comes from having no one to call your own.
I'm not talking about him; I'm talking about the countries that go to support [Antonio] Guterres plan, because he needs the support of other countries, he cannot achieve that plan while many countries in the world are still supporting the terrorists in Syria. So, of course we support it, whether helping the people to live, to go back to their country, and to live in security without terrorists.
A savant, by definition, is somebody who has a disability and, along with that disability, has some remarkable ability. Prodigies and geniuses have the remarkable abilities that the savant shows, but they do not have a disability. So, by definition, a savant includes someone with a disability, and a prodigy or genius are people who have these remarkable skills but they do not have a disability.
There are few things more bizarre than watching people advocate that another country be bombed even while acknowledging that it will achieve no good outcomes other than safeguarding the 'credibility' of those doing the bombing. Relatedly, it's hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire than having one's national 'credibility' depend upon periodically bombing other countries.
One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.
God does not have to come and tell me what I must do for Him; He brings me into a relationship with Himself where I hear His call and understand what He wants me to do, and I do it out of sheer love to Him... When people say they have had a call to foreign service, or to any particular sphere of work, they mean that their relationship to God has enabled them to realize what they can do for God.
Suddenly I find myself feeling sorry for those greedy, needy people whose huge salaries are never quite enough, whose sense of worth is defined by their own personal wad. What a diminished, impoverished world they must inhabit ... We should feel sorry for them and their sadly limited lives. Then we should remember never to trust the judgement of those whose priorities are so idiotically skewed.
I can't wait to go back home and disappear into relative obscurity for a bit. I just want to go back to my house and just get away from it all for a bit. It's so flattering to hear people say nice things about the performance, about the Harry Potter film. It's great. Don't get me wrong. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not shunning it. It's just been such a bubble I've been in, with these promotions.
I've always been on the outside of all that political stuff so I just sort of watch it and I'm appalled and I think people should be screaming about a lot of things right now and they're not. They're just letting everything happen. I don't know. At some point the wheels are going to come off and we're going to have a real problem. The people are going to get angry and it's going to be too late.
People do need a social license to go, "Ha ha ha," and have a good time. It's a strange thing. There's a lot of social ritual around comedy and laughter. It's a bonding experience for groups, but nobody can tell you much about how funny somebody is. Sometimes people just need to be in a group and be laughing together, just like they need to be in a group in watching some really terrifying film.
I really am just trying to tell stories. But stories are often grounded in larger events and themes. They don't have to be - there's a big literature of trailer-park, kitchen-table fiction that's just about goings-on in the lives of ordinary people - but my own tastes run toward stories that in addition to being good stories are set against a backdrop that is interesting to read and learn about.
In early 1999, I was watching TV, when I came across a story on Afghanistan. It was a story about the Taliban and the restrictions they were imposing on the Afghan people, most notably women. At some point in the story, there was a casual reference to them having banned the game of kite fighting. This detail struck a personal chord with me, as I had grown up in Kabul flying kite with my friends.
Look at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with [Pablo] Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch that I'm working on.
People hired by government know who is their benefactor. People who lose their jobs or fail to get them because of the government program do not know that that is the source of their problem. The good effects are visible. The bad effects are invisible. The good effects generate votes. The bad effects generate discontent, which is as likely to be directed at private business as at the government.
I personally feel that there's a lot of music journalism that is dominated by genre, because you need a language in which to write, but actually the things that strike people about music, are very hard to write about, and its sonic connections, it's a sense of harmony that I think we all have even if we don't know how to express it - it's something musical, it's synapse connections in our brain.
The future is created at the intersection of business, technology, design, and culture. *In the Bubble* is an insightful and delightful explanation of this nexus and of how each force affects the others. Designers often miss a great deal in their educations about the real people who will use and inhabit their work. Thackara astutely illuminates a lot of what designers don't know they're missing.
I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that but the really great make you feel that you too can become great. When you are seeking to bring big plans to fruition it is important with whom you regularly associate. Hang out with friends who are like-minded and who are also designing purpose-filled lives. Similarly be that kind of a friend for your friends.
George W. Bush, another Republican who I probably didn`t agree with on much, right after 9/11 went to a mosque and joined with some Muslim leaders and said that, look, you know, we`re not going to tolerate any backlash. These people who attacked our country are criminals and they`re terrorists, and they might try to profess a religion, but they definitely violate the principles of that religion.
What President Obama has done so masterfully of late is to say, in so many words, "I'm signing this executive order permitting federal funding for stem cell research, but I realize that many good, moral people are opposed to this, and I don't take that lightly." I think we can be more civil and empathetic in our discussions of public policy, and I hope my book can be a contribution to that tone.
Legislators could easily be out-voted if people voted in midterm elections. The fact that we don't talk about all this stuff [ abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, or voting rights] very much because Donald Trump and the general election is sucking all the air out of the room - if people aren't paying attention to their state, they're certainly not paying attention to what's happening in other states.
I think Jesus is a fact of history. I think a man named Jesus of Nazareth lived and was crucified. I think his death interpreted his life in a fantastic way, because if you study that life carefully underneath an overlay of theology and mythology, you'll find that the power of that life was that he was constantly giving himself away. He was constantly calling people to be all that they could be.
It's very important that a film that intends to play tricks on the audience... has to play fair with the audience. For me, any time you're going to have a reveal in the film, it's essential that it have been shown to the audience as much as possible. What that means is that some people are going to figure it out very early on. Other people not til the end. Everybody watches the film differently.
We don't understand what photography is doing. We don't understand the power of its rhetoric. We don't understand why the Provoke photographers showed Tokyo city as a ghastly and alien city when it was really going through this period of mega-capitalist growth. It's a very, very, very powerful force, the photograph. People ask me why it has such an ability to captivate us. And I just don't know.
I want to be able to get my point across. I respect people expressing their freedoms and their liberties and their rights, but at the same time I'm almost mindful that my freedoms can be other people's downfalls. I don't want to flash my freedoms in your face all the time, especially if they're going to be detrimental. I can get you to understand my point without going overboard, and we're cool.
What I was talking about was, of course, very autobiographical - '68 was the moment when all the young people were incredibly excited, because when we were going to sleep, we knew we would wake up not tomorrow, but in the future. There was a sense of future that was the result of the mixture of politics, cinema, music, the first joints. And the movies were a very important part of that cocktail.
We don't live in a shared reality, we each live in a reality of our own, and causing upset is often the price of trying to reach each other. It's always easier to dismiss other people than to go through the awkward and time consuming process of understanding them. We have given 'taking offense' a social status it doesn't deserve: it's not much more than a way of avoiding difficult conversations.
In a given scene I may know nothing more than how it's supposed to end, most of the time not even that. Scenes are improvised. A character does or says something, and with as much spontaneity and schizophrenia as I can muster, another character responds. In this way, everything I write is spontaneous chain reaction and I'm running around playing leapfrog in my brain trying to "be" all my people.
My vision of punk rock was these dudes who were spitting on the audience and moshing. That's why I kind of left that scene. Then I see all these people around my same age or between 17 and 25 that were making music themselves in their own town. They weren't just singing, but creating. I see them putting out this music where there are tons of women involved in the scene and involved in the bands.
My view is that to get anywhere in life you have to be anti-social, otherwise you'll end up being devoured. I've never been particularly social, anyway, but if I've ever been rude, fifty per cent of it has usually been provoked by other people's attitudes. Though I do admit, like most Celts, I'm moody. It's fine until people try to cheer you up with gems like, 'snap out of it' or 'Come on, now'.
Make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole. See yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel yourself being an opening through which energy flows from the unmanifested Source of all life through you for the benefit of all.
When you're an immigrant, you're at the bottom of the ladder. You might not be at the bottom of the ladder economically. Those contradictions led me to feel that the role in society I was given didn't jive with my sense of myself. I think, in fact, that is the case with most people. Everybody feels themselves to be in an original relationship to creation, and feels confined by their social role.
It would be much easier for me to be so tough - the tougher I am on Russia, the better. But you know what? I want to do the right thing for the American people. And to be honest, secondarily, I want to do the right thing for the world. If Russia and the United States actually got together and got along - and don't forget, we're a very powerful nuclear country and so are they. There's no up-side.
We must recognise that nations can and do sin corporately. God loves nations, and I join those who believe that God has a redemptive plan for each nation, or for that matter for each city or people group or neighbourhood or any visible network of human beings. But corporate national sin damages the relationship of the nation to God and prevents that nation from being all that God wants it to be.
I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.
This bowl has lived up to all the hype that I heard of it. Coaches...that have been here rave about the hospitality, rave about the venue and all the activities for the players. The people here have been marvelous. The bowl committee has bent over backwards to make sure that our stay is an excellent one. The players have something to do if they choose every day. You couldn't find a better place.
The most valuable insight I have made about how people make decisions is that when they become skilled they don't have to make decisions - choices between options. Instead, they can draw on experience and the patterns they have acquired to recognize what to do, ignoring other options. This is the basis of the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model my colleagues and I described thirty years ago.
Of the seven billion people who reside on planet Earth, only 25% could, in the broadest sense of the word, be classified as "Christian" (and the percentage who have personally trusted in Christ for salvation is much smaller), meaning that over five billion people in the world are destined to hell if indeed Christ offers the exclusive path for salvation. To many people, such a claim is offensive.
"There's no CEO for the government." But if you were CEO for a day at the government, would you have tools and reports and wherewithal to look at government the way a business would look at its lines of business, its spending, its revenue? I've actually been working, first by myself and then with a group of people, on then on and off, and now much more on, almost since the I time left Microsoft.
As Muslims, we are all equals, we abide by the laws and we understand that we have to be active citizens wherever we are. Our goals are first to live by our principles, to remind people of these values, to reconcile our respective societies with these shared universal values and to try our best to push for a spiritual agenda with more ethics in society, in politics, in economics, and in culture.
Generally, the ways we discuss the fat body pathologize it; we treat it as a medical problem and/or a social problem that must be solved. "Morbid obesity" is in many ways saying we are the walking dead. Or walking to our death. And that is no way to live, with that sort of moniker hanging over your head at all times. I think it forces fat people to internalize a lot of unnecessary self-loathing.
It's fascinating. It's also exhilarating when you see people making the exact same choices that you've made. It kind of validates what you've decided to do. I saw a wonderful production of Jessica Lange doing Streetcar with Alec Baldwin. It was gorgeous. It's a measure of what a great classic that is, that our Cate Blanchett also did an absolute amazing Blanche in Sydney, as well as in New York.
Kristen is really focused and really quiet, as an actress. She just does her thing, but she's cool. I like her. I know a lot of people have mixed comments about her, but I think she's a rad person. She's just focused on what she's doing, as an actress, and she wants to pick the right roles, and she's committed to her craft. She's really cool. We got along. There weren't any tensions or anything.
I miss working with my friends and the fun we had. Working on the series was the best time I ever had on a set. I am disappointed that they cancelled the series when they did, because I felt that by the seventh season, we were really hitting our stride, and that episodes were getting better and better. Some people say that the show had run its course and that it was time to quit, but I disagree.
I would have turned any offer down, if it had turned into a thriller. I would have seen no point in a thriller here. I don't need to entertain people, on top of what we were doing. It's not a question of whether he did it or not. I would have thought that was banal and uninteresting, and I wouldn't care. And it could have also turned into a shoot-out because there were a lot of guns in the film.
My movies are always being played on television, I'm very well known and all that stuff - I go all over the world, I have access to many things, many people, many places and it's wonderful. But now I'm at a point where...I thought it was time to show some of it, to show some of my feelings about things and what I preferred at the time. I prefer them still but not to the extent I did at the time.
So the Lincoln movie gets trashed because Connecticut voted for the amendment - not to mention how the people in Connecticut feel - but there's a lot of that. And I think it precedes from a fundamental misunderstanding of cinema. They are entertainment. And I'd like to say that entertainment isn't a synonym for disposable or mindless or stupid. Hamlet? Pretty entertaining from where I come from.