Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's always difficult to define what jazz is or what jazz isn't. To me, the only definition that I can think of is it's music where a lot of different elements are played at the same time. The harmonic, the melodic... You're pushing the boundaries on every level. That could be true of rhythm and blues as well. I'm a musician.
Education was a given, only because of the way I was raised. Truth be told, I thought, at 15 years old, I should go and get a record deal and drop out of school, and my parents would have had none of that. I'm grateful now that my parents were pushing me in that way, because I wasn't mature enough on so many levels to do that.
My father was always pushing me to become a basketball player. In Africa, when you're a kid, every kid loves to play soccer, and I loved playing soccer. But my dad didn't want me playing soccer. He would joke, 'C'mon, man, you're too tall!' Then he promised me, 'If you start playing basketball, I'm going to give you my jersey.'
Somewhere down the line, the evil ones stole the legacy of hip hop and flipped it to a corporate type of hip hop. They decided to tell everybody 'Well, this is what hip hop is,' instead of coming back to the pioneers and getting the true definition of what hip hop is and what it was and what we been pushing for all these years.
What I'm pushing for is an economic discipline that will be closer to other social sciences; in particular, we should be more pragmatic about the methods that we are using instead of pretending that we have our own scientific apparatus with very sophisticated mathematic models that distinguish us from sociologists and historians.
For me, the amazing thing was entering into this amazing world of 'Sesame Street.' We'd be in the kids' room, and there was a door into the soundstage that said '1-2-3 Open Sesame.' I remember pushing that door open and going into this incredible magical world of make-believe. In one episode, I was playing football with Joe Namath.
My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Even leaving aside government policy, whole industries are already making expensive changes around the perceived need to 'go green.' Al Gore and countless other prophets of global catastrophe are making megamillions pushing these expensive solutions. Schoolchildren around the globe are being frightened by tales of impending calamity.
My mother was a big influence. She kept pushing me because I was very shy and inhibited. And schoolwork was very difficult for me because I couldn't concentrate. I was failing almost every subject. To this day, I'm not too good at reading a book. But I was the president of my high school comedy group, and they treated me like a king.
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.
It just gives us that adrenaline charge when we go on. We know we're gonna come off two hours later, but we're pushing it all the way; we build it right through. It's amazing how it happens. It's sort of magical, because you couldn't do it in a rehearsal like that; you need that audience in front, and that's really what gets us going.
Decades ago, women suffered through horrifying back-alley abortions. Or, they used dangerous methods when they had no other recourse. So when the Republican Party launched an all-out assault on women's health, pushing bills to limit access to vital services, we had to ask: Why is the GOP trying to send women back... to the back alley?
Obama, Bloomberg and nearly every politician and gun-ban zealot pushing for a universal background check system are on record supporting mandatory gun registration, outright bans and even confiscation. To them, 'universal background checks' are just the first step in their long march to destroying our Second Amendment-protected rights.
Back in Romania, always I was struggling to compete with Vladislav Rastorotsky, the great Russian coach of Lyudmila Turishcheva. He was a powerful coach, internationally. I took him like the major challenge of my life, and pretty soon I'm beating him and we are pushing each other so hard, so fierce. But out of the arena, we are friends.
At one point in the 'Onyx Court' series, I think during 'In Ashes Lie', I suggested that Lune might come to love someone else eventually. Which was me pushing back against the narrative trope that people only get one True Love in their entire lives - an idea I think is kind of pernicious - but in retrospect, I wish I hadn't done it there.
Yes, CEOs are under pressure from all sides, and executives have all sorts of people pushing and pulling at them. But too often, they begin to view and treat their teams, and especially their assistants, as appliances. And a good assistant knows that the last thing their boss wants to hear from them is a personal complaint about anything.
Drag queens always base their personas on their favorite female icons. Mine was Barbie, who's not necessarily a human but is as iconic and beautiful as any woman. I started really pushing it because I hit a crossroads of, 'I don't want to look like a woman or a man. I want to look like a wind-up toy, a plaything manufactured in a factory.'
My dad, as a guy, had to quit school in the ninth grade, fought in the Battle of the Bulge. And spent his life pushing wheel barrels of heavy wet cement. So we've gone from pushing cement to now in one generation pushing legislation. But we always want any president to succeed, to do well; that means America does well and Americans do well.
So that would be my input and I'd go off and I'd work on another film, and then I'd catch up with them later on in the year. We just kind of nursed the piece along. There was no timeframe. We didn't have anyone pushing us except ourselves to make the film, and a desire. And then the organic kind of naming of Roger; then it happened really fast.
I wanted to be involved in music and I felt I needed to get in quick. I didn't want to spend four years in college and then hope for the best. I gave myself a year, which is why I kept pushing people for a chance. I literally felt my whole life was in the balance. Music was my life, and I was scared of having time pass by and missing my chance.
Despite the evidence that we already have too many students in higher education, the hot new idea among the political class is to double down by pushing for 'free college tuition.' The problem with the 'free college' idea is, however, not merely financial. It also reinforces the myth that college is appropriate or even possible for all students.
You have to develop a broad range of projects. One thing we've seen with 'This Is Us' is that people want to escape a little bit into the lives of others with beautiful emotional storylines where a country that needs a good cry can have one without seeming crazy. So I would say my real takeaway is that we should all be pushing for extreme emotion.
The changing climate is pushing already vulnerable communities into crisis situations. Children with asthma are forced to miss school and stay inside due to poor air quality. Day laborers and construction workers must work outside in dangerous temperatures. People without homes are unable to escape the impacts of hotter summers and wetter winters.
The side plank and plank jumping jacks are all really great; just be sure to hold that naval to the spine as hard as you can. As for reps, do as many as you can and try for more on your next workout. If you can only do five on Tuesday, make sure you do six or seven on Wednesday. The only rule? Never go back to five! Always continue pushing forward.
Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring.
Don't ever give up on yourself. Keep pushing because the change of guards is what life's all about. [...] You've always got to stick with whatever you're into because you're day is going to come. You're day is destined. If you walk away from that, whether it be from fear or whether you're just giving up. [...] The greatest sin is fear and giving up.
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
