Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You feel like you want something, but you don't actually know what that is. I remember waking up the other night and really craving something, but not knowing what it is. That feeling has been prominent throughout my whole life. I think I try and fill that thing with lots of different things. I can't really stay still. I can't really not be stimulated. It's kind of a search of constant stimulation through other people, substances and stuff. I think that's what our lyrical content is about.
Popper and Nabokov are very different people in some ways - and I'm ready to devote large chunks of my life to both of them. Popper didn't think much of words but thought ideas mattered, and Nabokov didn't think much of ideas, but words mattered, and so on. But both of them had a sense that this is a world of infinite discovery, unending discovery. That quest to discover more in any direction is what I think drives me, and what drives humans, when they're doing the most interesting things.
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.
The claim that the Government made that there were 21 measures in it is wrong. We said we wanted to wait till we saw the bill because we didn't to trust that it would be as they described and it's turned out we were exactly right for saying that. The Government has been entirely deceptive with this. And if their first action is to lie to the Australian people about what was meant to be their centrepiece bill, that really tells you want the [Malcolm] Turnbull Government's going to be about.
Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
To make a live record - something that has a lot of life in it - is difficult. After slaving away for years in the studio, when I hear a No Age record or when I hear Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first EP or when I hear DRI or really early punk stuff, it's just so powerful, so raw - and I know how hard that is to create. It's very deceptive. It's like a Dardenne brothers film - it seems like just a handheld camera following some people around in a trailer park, but it's incredibly difficult to do that.
There are certainly people for whom politics is not a category that helps you understand human existence. In fact, it's kind of a detour into superficiality, and although I disagree with those people, I don't think it's the case that everyone who writes has to write politically or has to write in opposition to the really horrendous things that are going on on a political level in the world today. There are some writers who simply aren't any good at that and really should stay away from it.
I think we waste a lot of time trying to convince other people that we're right. A lot of times we don't actually care what another person thinks, we just want to say what we think. To hear it reflected back to us and that we're okay, to hear that we have been understood and that we're correct - so that we can continue to be who we are in the ways we've been being, and we have nothing to feel bad about and everything is just fine. Even if what we're talking about is, like, police brutality.
In raising the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates in the same manner as simple interest does in the accumulation of debt. Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods, both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits; they are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
I would say that Futurama: Bender's Big Score requires a lot of concentration to watch. It's a very complicated time-travel story. Part of the joke on that was just that the complexity would be over the top. This one is a more straight-forward science-fiction story, I would say. Alien invasion and people running in terror, that kind of thing, with a slight twist of there being an inappropriate physical relationship with the big octopus monster. We've got a straight-up science-fiction movie.
An audience will let you know if a song communicates. If you see them kind of falling asleep during the song, or if they clap at the end of a song, then they're telling you something about the song. But you can have a good song that doesn't communicate. Perhaps that isn't a song that you can sing to people; perhaps that's a song that you sing to yourself. And some songs are maybe for a small audience, and some songs are for a wide audience. But the audience will let you know pretty quickly.
Whatever you have in your show should be special, but not over the top to the point that it takes the focus away from the collection. After all, the clothes are the most important. But I don't see why I shouldn't do something that makes people smile: they are three weeks into fashion weeks, they are running all over the place, so there's no harm to coming to a show and being entertained. Of course, it has to work with the concept of the collection, it can be tricky but I know where to stop.
I have become a giant fan of the testing process, especially with a comedy. I mean, they tell you what's funny. It's almost tailor-made for people who shoot the way we shoot, trying a million different options and versions of things. Because the audience doesn't laugh at a joke, we put in another joke. If they don't laugh at the next joke, we put in another joke. You just keep doing them and you can get the movie to the point where every joke is funny, if you have enough options in the can.
I think that people in the phase between being someone's kid and being someone's parent have always been uniquely narcissistic, but that social media and Twitter and LiveJournal make it really easy to navel-gaze in a way that you've never been able to before. People taking pictures of what they eat and showing them on their Facebook. People assume that people have a level of interest in what they're doing that's maybe far greater than it is, although there is an audience for all that stuff.
The population explosion is an ecological phenomenon of displacement. Unless we solve that ecological problem of displacing people - to build huge dams, to build motorways, to take away what people need in order to survive - we will keep pumping more and more money into population programs. We will have more and more coercive and violent methods through which women's bodies are treated as experimental grounds for new contraceptives. Yet we will not have a solution to the problem of numbers.
America ... holds up its way of life as the ideal for every nation, and seeks to impose its own standards of living - which many people think ridiculously and unwholesomely high - on others, partly of course in the search for markets. If it were openly stated that it was just a search for markets, that would be one thing, but it is not; by a tremendous propaganda campaign this materialistic conception is held up as an ideal, as somehow part of liberty, and above all, as a form of happiness.
The indigenous peoples of the great tourist spots seem to lose their souls. All cultural, religious, and political efforts and ideals are crippled since the culture is engaged only in luring ever more tourists. It is not the contact with an essentially foreign population that corrupts the inhabitants of the great foreign resorts. It is the contact with great masses of people who are seeking fir the moment only well-being and not salvation that weakens and devalues the indigenous population.
Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. The argument goes that, if people could see just how many of us there are, some in very important places, the negative stereotype would vanish overnight. ...It is far more realistic to suppose that, if the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.
I feel like if we stopped pushing people away in trying to get to the top, we could work together. My goal is to start with my family and my friends, progressively get better and create opportunities for them to express themselves and become happy people, then have them affect the people they're around. [I want to] create this growing effect of positivity and inspired a willingness to overcome any obstacles that are in front of you, whether it be from our government or from our daily lives.
I think for us, we don't feel like the future of music is in the act of being a record company. We feel like the future of the music business is in empowering artists to have better and better tools to communicate with their fans. We want to be people who are saying to artists, "Look, you don't need that company over there to release your album. You can do it this way." Almost more of a band partnership than a label-artist relationship. Not about ownership of content, but about empowerment.
I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration.
In a democracy, everyone has the right to criticise the Government. Normally, the opposition gets more media space and even the people find it interesting to listen to voices against the government of the day. Ever since I took office, my friends in the opposition have been levelling baseless allegations about my foreign trips. Had these trips been a failure, then they would have based their comments on specific issues. When opponents keep harping on one point, it is a sure sign of success!
Most people don't know this, but if you settle a debt for less than the amount you owed, you are potentially responsible for taxes on the forgiven debt. Look at it this way: You received goods and services for the full amount of debt, but you're only paying for a portion of it - sometimes less than 50%. Anything more than $600 is generally considered taxable, but the IRS will sometimes waive the tax if you can prove that your assets were less than your liabilities when the debt was settled.
People are stereotypes, they are caricaturized. It comes from both sides of the political aisle, it comes from the press. It's all about conflict, it's all about personality, and there are huge stakes in the policies that are being debated, and I think there's a hunger amongst a very significant, maybe even a critical mass of Americans, clustered on the left, right, and center, to have an adult conversation about how we're going to solve these problems ... but it's not for the fainthearted.
We reject the killing of innocents to achieve a radical and violent agenda. The terrorists and their state sponsors, Iran and Syria, have a much darker vision. They're working to thwart the efforts that of the Lebanese people to break free from foreign domination and build their own democratic future. The terrorists and their sponsors are not going to succeed. The Lebanese people have made it clear they want to live in freedom. And now it's up to their friends and allies to help them do so.
Civil society people - these are the people - civil society groups are the people who need to monitor the aid to ensure that the aid is directed to what it is supposed to. And in order for them to do so, they need to have the space, they need to have the freedom, and they need to have the right to demonstrate, and to petition their government. They can't do that in Ethiopia; they can't do that in Eritrea; and so this is why I was cautioning that we may be repeating some of our old mistakes.
The rules have changed as information and technology evolve, but it's essential that people stay in the streets, stay visible in their communities, on the news, on the Internet, and in this crucial public discussion. There are a million people just like you (or me), sharing the same doubts, fears, and insecurities that keep us from speaking out. Finding each other in our neighborhoods, online, in the streets - this is what keeps us from believing we're alone, from giving in to hopelessness.
I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.
I am now a mother and a grandmother, and I do not recall that I have ever ignored the claims of the nomadic button and the ceaseless call for sympathy, and the greatest demand on time and patience. My children and their children have been my closest thought, but from the first days of dawning individuality, I have longed unceasingly to make pictures of people... to make likenesses that are biographies, to bring out in each photograph the essential temperament that is called, soul, humanity.
This is how it works. I love the people in my life, and I do for my friends whatever they need me to do for them, again and again, as many times as is necessary. For example, in your case you always forgot who you are and how much you're loved. So what I do for you as your friend is remind you who you are and tell you how much I love you. And this isn't any kind of burden for me, because I love who you are very much. Every time I remind you, I get to remember with you, which is my pleasure.
Aristotle turns out to be an extremely practical guide for those asking such personally profound questions, like: What should I do next to find meaning and fulfillment in the next stage of my life?. He offers timeless advice to business people who want to be successful both at work and in their private lives. For example, he shows how business leaders can create successful organizations and, at the same time, behave ethically. Come to think of it, the CEO of Wal-Mart should study Aristotle!
We have the talent, just not the money and not the audience. People in France don't really like fantasy. You need to go to Spain, England and Germany for that. Many of the people from my crew come either from Spain or England. But I hope to be able to work with them again and I wish to create European cinema on that scale. It could happen and attitudes may be changing. Animated fantasy movie Despicable Me was made entirely in France, so there is the talent here and now maybe the desire too.
We have to change laws. We have to change our approach to policing and incarceration in general. But we can get the population to a point where we can then go to the community-based facility models, where people should be able to await their trial dates, or if you're in jail for a year or less, if you have some sort of time that you have to spend in jail, that you can do it closer to your networks. Your family can visit you. You can talk about other ways of having people complete their time.
People assume, because I'm Hef's girlfriend, that I'm a Bunny and I'm a Playmate and I'm a centerfold, but they're different things. If you're a Playmate or a centerfold, which is the same thing, you pose for the magazine, you are one particular month, and not every Playmate is a Bunny. A Bunny is a girl who used to work at the Playboy Club, she had the Bunny costume, and now that we don't have Playboy Clubs, it's just Playmates who work special promotions and are fitted for a Bunny costume.
Just look at the list of who the lowest-paid people are. Pediatricians are at the bottom. You would also look at internists. You would look at psychiatrists. You would look at family physicians, HIV specialists. People who take care of chronic illnesses by seeing people carefully over time, those are the people who get the least money. The people who have the most are people like orthopedic surgeons, interventional cardiologists. And my point isn't that there is something wrong with heroism.
If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World.
The America I do want to live in, is seeing how people respond to the victims of Hurricane Harvey. People of all races, all colors, all religions. You don't care what a person looks like, what their beliefs are - I'm helping them, because they are my fellow brother, or because they need my help. That's the America I want to live in. I don't want to live in Charlottesville, where you hate somebody because of the way that they choose to live their life. That's not a place where I want to live.
New information technologies-including email, the web, and computerized blast-faxes and phone calls-have fundamentally changed the landscape of political competition in modern democracies. They've done so in three ways: by dramatically boosting the access of individuals and special interests to politically potent information, by making it easier for such people to coordinate their activities and exert political power, and by greatly increasing the pace of events within our political systems.
I've known people that was a part of a family and always feel that the family liked everyone else but them. That hurts, and that's as deep a hurt as you can possibly get. I've known people that would have problems with their love life. This is kind of how blues began - out of feeling misused, mistreated. Feeling like they had nobody to turn to. Blues don't necessarily have to be sung by a person that came from Mississippi as I did, because there are people having problems all over the world.
I have my writing therapy. For me, writing and friends therapy is an internal journey where you go in deep, you reflect, you try to heal your inner child. But as an activist, there's the outward, going wide therapy, where you get to realize at a certain point that talking about yourself gets boring. And it's also unhealthy to be so much into yourself. At some point, you have got to be able to look at the issue and say, "It's not about you. It's about a culture, a people, a nation, a family."
For me, respect is an extremely important political term. Since I began campaigning, it has been at the heart of each of my speeches. Many people have the feeling that politicians aren't paying a sufficient amount of attention to them. And then, when the refugees arrived on top of all problems, there was a feeling: You do everything for them, but nothing for us. This mixture of frustration and fear has led to this reaction. That is why it is so important to show these people: We respect you.
Most people don't get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says 'you can't say that' or 'you shouldn't say that' or 'that wasn't appropriate' so most of us human beings have a very deep underlying conditioning that says that just to be who we are is not OK.......Most human beings have an imprinting that if they're real, if they're honest, somebody's not gonna like it. And they won't be able to control their environment if they tell the truth.
I'm a big believer in the collective unconscious. The idea that there is a deep connection between all of us that goes back to our ancestors and forward to the people who will come after us. It's essentially the job of the artist to anchor that nebulous space, and I think that's what a writer does: goes to that strange place and brings back these little trinkets. The unspoken experience percolated throughout the generations allows you to have knowledge of things you wouldn't know first hand.
We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants".
I look for people who have raw intelligence and a great work ethic and loyalty, and I can quickly identify people who have the right ingredients. But sometimes it is more difficult to get them to accept the fact that they can take on increasing responsibility. Oftentimes individuals will decide how far [they] go by how much work they're willing to put in and how quick they are to ask for help. Too many people have this deep-seated fear that if they ask for help, they will be thought less of.
The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty.
Faced with unmeasurables, people steer their way by magic. Before the invention of navigational instruments, a beautiful lady was carved on the prow of the boat to help sailors cross the ocean; and architects, grappling with the intangibles of design, select a guru whose work gives them personal help in areas where there are few rules to follow. The guru, as architectural father-figure, is subject to intense hate and love; either way, the relationship is personal, and necessarily one-to-one.
Everyday though, I'm just looking for like- I always ask people, What are you listening to? What sounds are good to you? Alot of people are in their car, in the club or on the internet looking and I just don't do any of that. Usually if I'm out and about it's because I have something to do, because I'm like a really big home body. If I'm at home, im watching Nickelodeon cartoons so sometimes I'm out of the loop with the cool music, but for sure I'm predicting that J.Cole is going to be good.
I've had people say, "You know, this 'Hope and Change' business, Rush, it's just as dangerous as, 'Make America Great Again,' all the specifics." And what you're really saying - even though you didn't voice this - is Barack Obama ended up being an authoritarian. He ended up being supported as an authoritarian because his wacko base wanted that stuff done - i.e., they wanted conservatives humiliated and defeated and ticked off and mad and losing everything, and they didn't care how Obama did.
I find flying interesting in that it's a very intimate experience. You're so close, physically, to one or two other people and you eat, sleep, do everything together. I've met the most extraordinary people on planes, some of whom I've stayed in touch with, some I haven't. Even if you're beside someone who ignores you for eight hours, there's a physicality you wouldn't put up with from anyone other than someone you knew well. You're in it together, even if you never say a word to one another.