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I think the desire to be a journalist started post-911. I'm Syrian American. I speak fluent Arabic. I'd come back to the States for college. I went to Skidmore in upstate New York. I was coming from Turkey, and I'd noticed that I could talk about concepts and ideas and people who seemed foreign to Americans, and they were interested in what I had to say. I think some of it is maybe because I'm very unassuming and I look American, but I'm very much from there as well so I can speak with authority about all of these issues.
People - Catholics and non-Catholics - are amazingly open to begin again in their walk with Jesus and in the Church when they hear clarity and honesty. What they don't put up with, thank God, is dishonesty and cover-up. And so I speak as openly as I possibly can about the difficulties of the Church because we shouldn't be afraid to call out an abuse of the wonderful gift God gives to us of the Church. When we - its members and its leaders - are imperfect we need to change. We need to begin again. That begins with honesty.
I still feel vibrant and alive that way. I'm in a marriage where we put an enormous amount into our marriage. I always say, there's me, there's my husband, and then there's the "us," the us that we create. That's what we really take care of. We never, ever take it for granted. We do everything we can to be together, not to be separated for periods of time. We're just a very, very tight family unit, and we're really kind to each other. I think it's so underrated; people don't appreciate the necessity of that in society now.
How often in life are you going to find your mate and that mate happens to be your same exact age and happens to have had the same life experiences to match where you are in our life so you guys can meet perfectly and give society what it wants? It just doesn't happen that way. Some people evolve at 24, some people are 60 and are still evolving. So why are we stopping these great connections based on age, or race or colour or whatever, gender, whatever? You meet who you meet and you connect because of your life experience.
The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other.
But I have a problem with the term 'light'. I never in my life knew what to do with that. I know that people have mentioned on some occasions that 'Richter is all about light', and that 'the paintings have a special light', and I never knew what they were talking about. I was never interested in light. Light is there and you turn it on or you turn it off, with sun or without sun. I don't know what the 'problematic of light' is. I take it as a metaphor for a different quality, which is similarly difficult to describe. Good.
Social media has had a huge impact on the industry. Models now have voices. We are connected directly to millions of people, and we are no longer just pretty faces modeling clothes. This has allowed us to reach a broad audience. This platform for models to connect directly with their fans has started to shift the power dynamic in the industry, but there's still a long way to go. I think we are heading in the right direction, as more people start to see the value in inviting models in the creative and collaborative process.
Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south - let all Americans - let all lovers of liberty everywhere - join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.
Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous.
Do you know the Democrats can't raise a dime? The Democrats' fundraising is practically nonexistent. And on the other side of that, Republican fundraising is through the roof! It's through the roof to the point that people can't believe it, even on the Republican side. Now, they're not gonna give Trump credit for it. I don't know who else is getting credit, but it should be Trump. But Republican fundraising is going through the roof. And I guarantee you the people giving the Republicans money are doing it because of Trump.
Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking nothing in return. With contempt you don't need to right the wrong (as with anger) or flee the scene (as with fear or disgust). And the best of all, contempt is made to share. Stories about the moral failings of others are among the most common kinds of gossip, they are a stable of talk radio, and they offer a ready way for people to show that they share a common moral orientation.
One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?
World War II vets in general didn't talk about their experiences. They believed there was something better and that they were going to prove to America what they could be and show America what it could be by being the change that they wanted. Like that Ghandi phrase "be the change that you want to see" but I think that it was also just a different culture. People didn't want to complain, whereas today if you go to the Starbucks and they mess up your order you might tweet about it. You know it's a different kind of culture.
Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic.
Barack Obama today is directing every federal agency to make sure we evaluate candidates on the level without regard to their employment history. So if you are a rotten employee, if you don't show up on time, if you don't get any work done, that cannot be examined as whether or not it makes sense to hire you. What we're gonna do is make sure that we only hire people who have been out of work the longest, because that's fair, regardless their work history, regardless whether they're qualified, this is Obama making it equal.
One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you're going east, and you will be walking east when you think you're going west.
People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored.
In South Africa, they dig for diamonds. Tons of earth are moved to find a little pebble not as large as a little fingernail. The miners are looking for the diamonds, not the dirt. They are willing to lift all the dirt in order to find the jewels. In daily life, people forget this principle and become pessimists because there is more dirt than diamonds. When trouble comes, don’t be frightened by the negatives. Look for the positives and dig them out. They are so valuable it doesn't matter if you have to handle tons of dirt.
Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
Even CEOs police their own bureaucracy. Trump is not that. He does have more in common with these guys than most elected officials would have, particularly in the Obama administration. Obama didn't have anybody that'd ever worked in the private sector. All they had is a bunch of theoreticians who thought they were smarter than everybody that runs businesses in the private sector. And who knows what kind of pressure was brought to bear. Remember, Obama's agenda was one that was to be governed against the will of the people.
I have a sense of respect: respect for my suppliers, respect for the staff, respect for the customer - as long as they respect us. When we have a customer who is playing a provocative, disrespectful game, then we just prefer to just throw him out, rather than deal with it. Some people, sometimes, are unhappy themselves. And that can really create a frustrating performance to us and to the staff and all that. I don't throw customers out as much as I used to. In the old days, "You don't like it? Get out!" I'm much nicer now.
Very often the people who are shooting your film do not look like you if your film is brown-centric in some way. What is very interesting is to be going through these scenarios and turning around and looking at so many faces that are not yours. Even though those faces are looking at you in love, it puts you in a space when you are on a plantation in that condition. I think that it allows you to see further into possibly what that place really was for someone else, except thank God we're with people who love and respect us.
I think, when all bands start, when you're on your first album you have the benefit of hoovering up people who genuinely come across the music and really like it, but also those sort of 'floating voters' who just like pop music when they're young. And I think that when you get to your fourth album, those floating voters have dissipated and you're left with a core audience, and at that point you've really got to get your act together and move on to something else to keep afloat, or you'll just shrink with your core audience.
You can't expect people who didn't exist as a community at all until about twenty years ago to have formed a political movement. This attack on the LGBT community was very shocking to the people who consider themselves to be activists. They're basically playing in the sandbox, and there's a tank coming! And what are they supposed to do - use the plastic shovel to push the tank back? But since the homosexual propaganda legislation, people have really stepped up, educated themselves politically, and grown by leaps and bounds.
I was born in the United States, I'm proud to be an American, I'm an American first. But obviously, I'm a Chinese-American. And growing up, my family, my parents, and I think rightly so didn't put us in Chinatown, didn't put us with our other ethnic group, but put us in mainstream America. They're thinking was that will help us assimilate into the mainstream and be a part of it. And it did. It certainly gave me tolerance of other people, of other races, of other ethnicities and I think that's helped make me a better person.
if I could tell my very-younger self something, I would tell him to let loose more often. I think it all roots in sexuality, but because of that, I became so worried about everything — worried about what people thought. I was afraid to be creative and charismatic and eccentric. Just to do things to do things, like dancing. I was afraid of looking too flamboyant or something. I would tell myself to stop being so stressed about what other people are thinking. Stop being so afraid that something may not come off the right way.
I think Carl Jung said, you know, I'm gonna paraphrase it badly, but, so much of what we fall in love with in other people is a potential in us that's ready to be realized. We're projecting onto them this amazing thing, but really it's us, and we're very close to integrating it and claiming it. If we do claim it, then we can just love somebody for who they are with all their flaws, but if we don't take that projection back, then we keep wanting them to have that. Then you just realize we're all screwed, that's how it works.
The general systems of money management today require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work. Mutual funds charge two percent per year and then brokers switch people between funds, costing another three to four percentage points. The poor guy in the general public is getting a terrible product from the professionals.
The legislative job of the President is especially important to the people who have no special representatives to plead their cause before Congressand that includes the great majority. I sometimes express it by saying the President is the only lobbyist that one hundred and fifty million Americans have. The other twenty million are able to employ people to represent themand thats all right, its the exercise of the right of petitionbut someone has to look after the interests of the one hundred and fifty million that are left.
The problem right now is that central banks have not normalized their balance sheet since 2009. They're trying, but it's not even close. If we had another crisis tomorrow, and you had to do QE4 and QE5, how could you do that when you're already at $4 trillion? They might have to turn to the IMF or SDR or to Gold. Then, if you go back to the gold standard, you have to get the price right. People say there's not enough gold to support a gold standard. That's nonsense. There's always enough gold, it's just a question of price.
Well, I'm telling them two things. One is that, look, this is going to be something when the American people realize - once it's passed - that, A, it does take care of preexisting conditions; B, you're insurance rates aren't going to skyrocket; C, the insurance companies aren't going to be running the show like they were before; D, you're going to be in a position where you can keep your insurance that you have. That once the American public realizes that, you're going to get a reward for this. They're going to be rewarded.
A permanent and sustainable solution to all the problems facing working people is possible by taking the biggest companies into democratic ownership, and reorganizing the economy on a democratically planned basis. Under such a system we could democratically decide how to allocate resources. We could rapidly transition away from fossil fuels, develop massive jobs programs to rebuild the country's rotting infrastructure, and begin to build a whole new world based on meeting the needs of the majority, not the profits of a few.
Whether or not belive in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it's your fault - that if you'd tried better, worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance? I know poeple who'll hear about the people who died, and will say that it was God's will. I know people who'll say it was bad luck. And then there's my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at hte wrong time. Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn't you?
People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act of courage... missed the point. Courage and physical endurance were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages or immunity to hepatitis. The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world.
Sometimes I am still surprised that I'm a model and that people think I'm good-looking. I've gone through a lot of different phases on what I do and why I do it - morally and ethically. I've tortured myself about it, especially in dealing with success and money. I just had to learn to look at it as a job, as opposed to identifying myself as a model and thinking of myself as a part of this industry. I just thought, Okay, this is an opportunity to learn and see and meet people. Still, I am a Scorpio and I'm quite competitive.
When you have to cast movies from a producer's standpoint - when you've been on the other side of casting sessions - you just get a completely different perspective on what that process is of getting a job for an actor. You realize how completely impersonal it is. If anything, I think it's made me a lot less sensitive. So much of this is logic and business, and it's got nothing to do with whether people are good or not. Unfortunately, I think that's one of the last things that gets factored in when you're assembling a cast.
Comedy is actually very hard. It's hard to choose those moments and know when you can really push it, and know when you should be bringing it back and making it more subtle, and knowing as time goes on, as you do take after take and the crowd around you stops laughing. Whenever you do comedy, you realize you're up against - you're performing next to people who you would think are so unbelievably good at it, that that's a bit of a pressure. But at the same time, it's just fun. It's fun to be able to let out that side of you.
Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 - a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 - meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world.
Once you start to ask patients about their priorities, you discover what they're living for. Once you uncover that, it helps you, as a doctor, decide what to fight for. And when we do that, we often end up identifying limits to the kind of care that people want. One's assumption is that these people are going to live shorter lives, but what we're doing is protecting quality of life. In doing so, you sometimes end up helping people live longer. Certainly, you help people live better days and with more purpose in their lives.
Architects are today routinely indoctrinated against the dumb box. Even advertising urges us to "think outside the box." Why? Because it is thought we all hate the box for being too dumb, too boring, and we want to escape it. If we do escape, by buying the advertised product, we usually find ourselves inside another dumb box populated by boring people just like us. It is clearly possible to live an extraordinary life inside a dumb box. Question: is it possible to lead an extraordinary life in anything other than a dumb box?
The people who've done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] - who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don't succeed - people who've had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever - are the people who didn't want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn't want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success.
Taking ideas seriously does not fit with the rhetorical style of textbooks, which presents events so as to make them seem foreordained along a line of constant progress. Including ideas would make history contingent: things could go either way, and have on occasion. The 'right' people, armed with the 'right' ideas, have not always won. When they didn't, the authors would be in the embarrassing position of having to disapprove of an outcome in the past. Including ideas would introduce uncertainty. This is not textbook style.
I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so - a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)
I do believe that the Barack Obama administration has reached a new low by using the instruments of the state against its political adversaries. Obama does not see people who disagree with him as well-meaning opponents but rather as enemies. That's not something that Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton did as President. Probably Obama's direct descendant in this line is Richard Nixon. And Obama seems to have carried Nixonian tactics to a new low. So, we've turned a corner in American politics that doesn't bode well for our future.
The planet earth has a life span of eight billion years, give or take a few million. People have been around for approximately forty thousand years-a virtual blink in the cosmos. It is sad that we as a species are ravaging the natural world so fast that we are jeopardizing our survival. If we wipe ourselves out, it would be the height of folly, but the earth will survive even us. It will eventually restore itself. It might take a few thousand years, and it won't be just as it was before, but its life is stronger than death.
The culture of the State Department is very negative towards a conservative foreign policy. And the model that we all have, of civil servants as neutral careerists who carry out the policy of the elected president, doesn't work nearly the way it should in the State Department. So that there are many people who want to be good civil servants, who want to try and carry out these policies, but are afraid to do so. And I'm not even counting the very small number of conservatives in the State Department who are genuinely at risk.
Obviously it's easier when I' m doing the adapting myself. But my feeling is, your potential upside far outweighs the downside. Ultimately, they [moviemakers] can't change your book. Your book remains on the shelf the way you wrote it. If they make a great movie of your book, then you have the equivalent of millions and millions of dollars of advertising for your book. If the movie's not that good, that doesn't mean the book's not good. It doesn't change what you've already written. It has the potential to reach more people.
To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.
In the short stories - if I can make a very lumpy contrast - in the short stories I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face something; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart.
I've had stuff of mine adapted by other people, so I've come to the conclusion that a movie is a different form from a novel and there is no such thing as a true adaptation. You have to adapt to this other thing and do it right. But that voice of the original should somehow still be there, and the original intent should still be there. So if the original writer saw the movie, the writer would say, "Well, that's not what I wrote, but that's what I meant." And if you can do that, I think you've done your job as a screenwriter.