Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We have reached the age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in life's struggle, when beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashing of the dragon's tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with the same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke a thought aloud, 'Why doesn't he hit him on the head?' Alas, comrads, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile.
We live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. We shouldn't be able to choose and say, 'You get to live free and you don't.' That means people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. Like Joe (Lieberman), I'm also wrestling with the extent to which there ought to be legal sanction of those relationships. I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into.
I am also very excited by the way in which we can see Paul wrestling not only with his Jewish world and its scriptures but also, by clear implication, with philosophical and political issues that were 'out there' at the time. The thing is that for Paul this is all part of the same larger, whole vision of God and God's purposes. Watching how everything comes together is an intellectual treat of the first order - as well as a spiritual and practical challenge to me personally and to the church.
I used to do fight sequences, and I started to get self-conscious about fight sequences, because invariably the other person would get hurt, and you never want anyone to be hurt on a film, let alone you being responsible. The great thing about working with guys who have spent their life choreographing fights for wrestling is that that's what they do. That's their specialty. Their specialty is selling taking hits. Their specialty is selling explosive hits without making a contact or doing too much damage.
He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.
It is not that God is stingy and must be coaxed, for He "giveth liberally and upbraideth not." It is that we ourselves are so shallow and sinful that we need to tarry before Him until our restless natures can be stilled and the clamor of outside voices be deadened so that we can hear His voice. Such a state is not easily reached, and the men God uses have paid a price in wrestlings and prevailing prayer. But it is such men who rise from their knees confident of His power and go forth to speak with authority.
Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.
Who can break the law? If I break this glass, it will fall down. If anyone succeeds in throwing one atom out of place, every other atom will go out of balance. . . . The law can never be broken. Each atom is kept in its place. Each is weighed and measured and fulfils its [purpose] and place. Through His command the winds blow, the sun shines. Through His rule the worlds are kept in place. Through His orders death is sporting upon the earth. Just think of two or three Gods having a wrestling match in this world! It cannot be.
No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told it is to the one to whom it is told another fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think.
Wrestling is a one-on-one experience and if something goes wrong you can't point a finger and blame somebody else. What you do is up to you. And yet it's a team sport, because whether your team wins or loses is a result of the cumulative effect of the matches. Wrestling is a great confidence builder because it's not all about strength. You have to use your balance and skill and technique and if you do, you can overcome a lot of muscle and bulk guys, and even those who have natural ability. Basically, you can out-technique an opponent.
My worlds are completely different. Painting is a peaceful world, and it's a different vibe than having a great match. You are able to look back at what you created when you finish. Recording music is an entirely different monster. When you finally write something, you do a demo and then you go into the studio. Doing the master version, that's the best feeling ever - especially when you're so proud of what you've written, and you can't wait for people to hear it. That's actually very similar to trying to tell a story in a wrestling match.
The thing is, people don't understand that girls right now are being forced to have to pick one or the other. You are being forced to have to choose wrestling or an education. I got a scholarship going to school in Canada, but it was pretty expensive because I was an international student. And so for some girls right now, they don't have the means or the opportunities to do both. A lot of girls are obviously choosing an education because you need a future and a career and everything, and wrestling can't promise everyone that. I think that's a huge barrier.
If I... if I competed in Bruno Sammartino's era, I'd have been champion for 20 years, too. No, I'd have been champion for 30 years. Because wrestling one night a month at Madison Square Garden is easy. You never see a Hulk Hogan wrestle TLC matches against a superstar like Ryback. Because he had it easy. I wrestle physically demanding matches on free television, week in and week out. So much that my one year equals 30 of theirs. And I have attained this success, not... not because of you. I am successful not because of you. I am successful in spite of you.
In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.
Sometimes the sight of someone in one faith wrestling with that faith can empower you to wrestle with another faith. For me, it was reading about how the Catholic Church wrestled with itself in the 1960s. Pope John XXIII set Nostra Aetate - the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions - in motion. It changed the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Today, Jews and Catholics meet as friends. If you can do that, after the longest history of hatred the world has known, that empowers you as a Jew or a Muslim to wrestle with your faith.
In wrestling there are so many people inside and outside the ring, and it's so live, and it's this whole adrenaline thing. Whereas you move it into this more intimate thing, everything gets all quiet, someone says action, and you have to say the lines and make the words your own. It couldn't be any more different and it's weird sometimes trying to explain that to people. When I tell people that acting is much more terrifying to me than going out in front of ten thousand people, they don't quite believe it because for some reason that intimacy is just terrifying to me.
I think that any sort of hindsight, especially in this wrestling industry, is a waste of time, and time is extremely valuable. I don't control that. People ask me to do something, and it is our job, as entertainers, to do the best that we can to accomplish that goal. What I get upset about in this business is that so many people talk about the "what if," instead of the "what is." The "what is" is more important. If someone were to go back 15 years and say, "You should have done this," it's too late. I was told to do "X," and I was trying to do "X" the best way that I could.
The believer's cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer's cross must be, like his Lord's, the price of his social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of the path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not, like Luther's or Thomas Muntzer's or Zinzendorf's or Kierkegaard's cross, an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come.
I thought that conclusion that we leaped to right after the election, that has been disproven statistically so many times, I don't know why Republicans would advocate that advocating for comprehensive immigration reform is somehow a political solution for the Republicans losing a percentage of Hispanics. I probably have less appetite for this than either the Senate or colleagues in the House, certainly the Democrats and most likely members of the Republican Conference. They are still wrestling with trying to get their education up to a level where they can actually advocate for policy.