Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are many female gods recognized and honored by the tribes and Nations. Femaleness was highly valued, both respected and feared, and all social institutions reflected this attitude. Even modern sayings, such as the Cheyenne statement that a people is not conquered until the hearts of the women are on the ground, express the Indians understanding that without the power of woman the people will not live, but with it, they will endure and prosper.
If experience be consulted, it will be found there is no action, however abominable, that has not received the applause of some people. Parricide - the sacrifice of children - robbery - usurpation - cruelty - intolerance - prostitution, have all in their turn been licensed actions, and have been deemed laudable and meritorious deeds with some nations of the earth. Above all, Religion has consecrated the most unreasonable, the most revolting customs.
I used to work in an office in New York for this terrible company, and we used to have staff meetings, and I would just count how many times the boss would use the phrase "in terms of." And he would say it like 30 or 40 times. And sometimes he would just say it. He'd be like, "Uhh, in terms of, how are we doing with that?" I realized nobody knows what they're talking about. Everyone's bullshitting. Maybe not everybody, but certainly a lot of people.
I believe Tunisia and Egypt should look to Turkey and see what not to do. Turkey seems to be a secular and democratic country but it is only a show. We are losing the effectiveness of democratic institutions like parliament and judiciary. They now are turning into tools for the benefit of a president-ordering system. A democratic government is possible only on a comprehensive democratic base surrounded by the participatory action of ordinary people.
We are all living longer lives now, so this extra longevity gives us second, third or fourth chances to succeed at something or change careers. It is great to think big, but the formula for success in our time is also to THINK LONG. There is a huge waste of talent out there because people think they are 'too old' or 'too late'. Actually, if you take the span of productive life from 20 to 80, at 50 you still have 50% of productive years ahead of you.
Well, the film's not only pricking the pomposity of the Church, it's pricking the pomposity, and sometimes you would think fraudulence, of the insurance companies. I had never read anything like this until I was doing the film, but Mark [Joffe, the director] and people showed me stuff where, like a flood, it mattered where the water came from. If you're flooded from above, you get the money; if you're flooded from below, you don't. What's that about?
I'm So Sick is about how the world can sometimes be a sick and messed up place and how that influences us and tells us how we should live or who we should be. People do things just 'cause everyone else does and then they wonder why they feel empty all the time. Someone who has a firm stance in what they know to be true will empower empty followers to discover who they are as individuals with purposes and this creates leaders with voices of their own.
When my friends who were college age took a year off of school, they'd play in Weatherbox, or between high school and college. People always joined on a short-term basis and I did things one day at a time, I guess. There was never a big plan when someone was joining. They were never joining on a full-time membership basis. Since then, we just deal with it. I'd like to have a band that's a total constant, but it's probably not realistic at some point.
Most people assume that folks with amazing mental abilities were born this way and that they operate on a plane that's inaccessible to the rest of us. But nothing could be further from the truth. For more than a decade, I've studied people with uncanny abilities - card counters who can beat the house, self-taught artists, people who can remember an unbelievable amount of information. Here's the thing: These weren't innate skills - they were acquired.
The silver lining of Brexit and Trump is that it has undermined the perception that globalization is an unstoppable force, whether or not we think it is a good thing or a bad thing. There have always been losers and as well as winners in this process, and cultural minorities have been among the most vulnerable losers. Now that sizable numbers of people in the most advanced economies have made their grievances felt in a fashion that is hard to ignore.
The more people that understand and are made able to spot liberalism, and then the more people are able to associate liberalism with the problems in their lives, the political problems, the economic problems, the more people can be conditioned and educated to understand that liberalism is the problem, coupled with the ability to spot it, would be the fastest way to eradicate it. It would be really helpful if we had a Republican Party engaged in this.
I think the entrepreneurial activities that make art visible and attractive are what lure people into the amusement park that SoHo has become or that Bushwick or Williamsburg has become. It's not that outsiders come to an area because they hear artists are living there. A lot of people came who were not that interested in living with artists, but they were interested in living like artists and socializing the way that they thought artists socialized.
My idea of what was going on in politics was driven by activism. I came out when I was 17, and right away I started working in the AIDS activist movement. For me, politics was about getting drugs approved and getting prisoners access to the same kind of drugs that you could get on the outside. It was about getting needle exchanges approved. That was politics. These were policy problems that were killing people, and we were trying to get them changed.
The Web took off in all its glory because it was a royalty-free infrastructure . . . When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going to end in the U.S.A. If we had a situation in which the U.S. had serious flaws in its Net Neutrality, and Europe did have Net Neutrality, and I were trying to start a company, then I would be very tempted to move.
We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?
People - pardon me, journalists and politicians - have often accused me of believing that I'm above the law. And yet, who isn't? Everywhere you prod it, even with the shortest stick, the established system isn't simply corrupt, it's unequivocally putrescent. The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I'm above the law. And so are you.
A vast majority of the geographical area of the country would have been ignored during the campaign, and so the results would have been different. Who's to say Donald Trump would not have done better in California if he'd spent some time out there? And who's to say that Hillary Clinton would have done worse if she'd spent some time out there and actually had been seen by people in California like she was seen elsewhere as having questionable stamina.
I hate The Oscars. The Oscars make me want to throw things at the TV. In the ancient history of The Oscars, people would go on and make political statements and get thrown off the stage, but the last great political statement, I think, was when Michael Moore started raging against Bush a few years back. Everybody booed him, even though I can't imagine Hollywood booing a guy who's bashing Bush. That was the last great spontaneous moment on The Oscars.
To me, one of the most profound questions we can ask is: "So what?" And so what if there's an indefinite number of worlds with alternate "us-es" in them? The "so what," to me, comes alive when I ask myself: "What if I could find a way to get in touch with those alternate mes who made those choices?" That is, persons who, if I saw them now, I wouldn't even recognize because their choices, once small, have multiplied to make them such different people.
Song in the Manner of Housman" O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon Therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree But he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung, and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera.... London is a woeful place, Shropshire is much pleasanter. Then let us smile a little space Upon fond nature's morbid grace. Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera.
When you build a big empire, you become the persona that people think they know. So when you try to show them who you are, to help them discover you, they just want what they think they know about you. I would have been smarter to build some relationships when I was younger, a private love or something. Today it is more difficult. But it's the price to pay. I never regret anything, because every choice I made for a reason, but I'd love personal love.
I'd like to get to a point where I am not considered natural by myself. When I say that I mean that I don't want to fit within the guidelines of what other people feel it is to be natural. If people feel that natural bodybuilders usually are the ones who lack legs or have poor body parts or don't train very hard or aren't very strong or aren't very intense, if that's your perception of what a natural bodybuilder is, then that's not what I want to be.
America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.
Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.
There's always a mismatch. I mean, you know, as the economy evolves, it reallocates resources. Now, the real problem, in my view, is - this has been - the prosperity has been unbelievable for the extremely rich people. If you go to 1982, when Forbes put on their first 400 list, those people had $93 billion. They now they have $2.4 trillion, 25 for one. That is - this has been a prosperity that's been disproportionately rewarding to the people on top.
It was really special for Bass Pro Shops to take Tracker off the side and put Joplin, Missouri on there. They have helped me a lot this past week with putting together ways to raise money to help rebuild Joplin. It's my hometown. It was heartbreaking to see the tornado and see all the people that lost their homes and the ones that lost their lives. It is really special that Johnny let us put that on there. Hopefully we made some people proud tonight.
It's a real enigma why people are so averse to real free market capitalism even now. Here we are, in the century that has seen Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot-and we're still being warned against the 'robber barons' of the 19th century. I don't know that Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller ever killed anyone. The State has killed countless people, and yet we're always supposed to remain on guard against these 'greedy villains' of yesteryear.
Years ago when I started doing TV and making appearances in big arenas, the place would put security guys up there and I said, "Please don't do that. It's very distracting to see ten cops in front of the stage. Everybody's looking at the officers instead of me. I don't want that." I also found that people will dare to break a barricade. If they have a barricade, somebody will always try to jump over it. I've found that the more open I am, the better.
I don't think that Donald Trump's gonna look at his approval numbers and say, "Wow, the American people don't want what I want to do. I better change." I don't think he's gonna change his agenda. To have put up with all of this to date already says a mouthful. It already explains a lot to have put up with this, to have not lost his cool. And, by the way, on all of these tweets and all these allegations, all these predications, he ends up being right.
The Democrats want illegal mirgation not they are humanitarian. This is not about compassion. This is not about love and a soft spot for people from these horrible places and wanting to give them a better life. This is about registering a bunch of future Democrat voters that are never gonna be able to fend or provide for themselves. This is about flooding this country with people who are going to be forever dependent on a government-run by Democrats.
There are so many fashion shows during fashion week, and the fashion show has almost become theater. It's all about the wow factor. And it's easy to make a name when you're shocking people all the time. But when you just make really, really great clothes, it can be difficult to get press and build a brand. What you do when you pare things back and make something timeless, though, is build a foundation to have a longer career and a stronger clientele.
I think that it drives from an emotional connection with everybody that pulls you through all of those events, whether it's the events or what would be more the action, or I guess the visual effects side of it. So it always starts with me from - emotionally - 'Why do you care about the people who are going through what they're going through?' Because it takes a hell of a lot to put them through that. So you better care for them when they're doing it.
The Stoic discipline of action, which is connected to the virtue of justice, says that we ought to treat others fairly and we should engage in social and political activity. This is further supported by the Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism, and by the famous "circles of concern" identified by Hierocles, who counseled that we should refer to other people as brothers and sisters, to constantly remind ourselves that we are members of the same human family.
And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.
The media is the only business in the world where the customer is always wrong. If you're a news consumer, if you're a customer, and you complain to them, they will tell you that you are not sophisticated enough to understand what they do, and they're tell you to go listen or watch somewhere else. They're not even really doing the news for you. They're doing news for other journalists and other people in government because that's their real audience.
India had barely become independent, in 1947, when Pakistan invaded Kashmir, which at the time was ruled by a maharajah. The maharajah fled, and the people of Kashmir, led by Sheikh Abdullah, asked for Indian help. Lord [Louis] Mountbatten, who was still governor general, replied that he wouldn't be able to supply aid to Kashmir unless Pakistan declared war, and he didn't seem bothered by the fact that the Pakistanis were slaughtering the population.
Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence.
The future of the German automobile industry is very much at stake. Will we help shape the upheaval that goes along with the shift to electric cars or will we suffer from it? We are the country of automobiles. If we aren't able to remain out front technologically, it will be painful. That is one of the decisive questions when it comes to jobs, income and prosperity - and not just for a few of the wealthy or super-rich, but for a huge number of people.
Could anyone in his right mind speak seriously of any limited nuclear war? It should be quite clear that the aggressor's actions will instantly and inevitably trigger a devastating counterstroke by the other side. None but completely irresponsible people could maintain that a nuclear war may be made to follow rules adopted beforehand, with nuclear missiles exploding in a "gentlemanly manner" over strictly designated targets and sparing the population.
If I could, I'd go city by city, county by county, town by town, and talk to people to explain to them what immigration is really about - that this is not about me, this is not about us, this is not about us taking something from you. This is not about us being a threat to you. This is not about Democrat or Republican, and this is not really about border security. But in some ways our politics, and in many ways our politicians, have gotten in the way.
. . . Cultivating good humor may be helpful in finding our own identity. Young people who are trying to find out who they really are often have concerns as to their ability to meet and cope with the challenges that confront them and that lie ahead. They will find that it is easier to ride over the bumps and come quickly to their own identity if they cultivate the good humor that comes naturally. It is important that we all learn to laugh at ourselves.
The broad rich acres of our agricultural plains have been long preserved by nature to become her untrammeled gift to a people civilized and free, upon which should rest, in well-distributed ownership, the numerous homes of enlightened, equal, and fraternal citizens... Nor should our vast tracts of so-called desert lands be yielded up to the monopoly of corporations or grasping individuals, as appears to be much the tendency under the existing statute.
I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there's a problem we want to basically go in with a screwdriver or else drop bombs on it. A better way to solve problems is to think indirectly and try to change the environment. So I think you can gain much better self-control not so much by working on yourself as by looking at the situations you're in and the people you hang around, and changing your environment.
You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and that you will too.
Fiction can produce truth, and truth can be false. What does it mean to say that it's true that, what, two out of six people in this city are starving? That's true, but that is only true because the conditions we live under are completely wrong - that should not be true, and it is. And in something like Sarah Polley's film, her fictions deliver so much truth. The retellings and the simulations and the theatrical aspects are what deliver all the truth.
There is an understandable vindictiveness in people who come from Communist countries. They want to keep telling us that we were fools to think that we could make radical changes in our society. Though I understand their dismay, respect their suffering and don't understand the gullibility of some people who don't take in how repressive these societies are, I still think it's important to keep people of all kinds as active in civic matters as possible.
People believe that companies have always had strategies, dating back at least to likes of Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie, maybe to the contractors who built the Pyramids. As it turns out, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that a new breed of "business intellectuals" began to develop the intellectual framework that allowed companies to look at the three "C's" of any good strategy - namely their costs, customers, and competitors - in an integrated way.
The con is a kind of jiu-jitsu that turns the sucker's own greed into its principal weapon. The greedier you are the more likely you are to be conned, and for the greater a sum. Since people regularly dispose of their intelligence in their rush to be swindled, and then turn right around and do it again, humans must want to be duped. Institutionalized wishful thinking - the stock market, religion, advertising - is after all a cornerstone of our system.
I was stricken by news and television pictures coming from the United States this morning. It is impossible to fully comprehend the evil that would have conjured up such a cowardly and depraved assault upon thousands of innocent people. There can be no cause or grievance that could ever justify such unspeakable violence. Indeed, such an attack is an assault not only on the targets but an offense against the freedom and rights of all civilized nations.
It's always been important to us to be original, which sounds really easy when you say it. Everyone says it all the time, but it's actually not that easy to be original. It's also something scary because if you're doing stuff that doesn't sound like anything else, I think a lot of people get scared of that. A lot of people tend to follow instead, they wait for something else to do something new and then they follow that. We just don't like to do that.