“I began to feel the desire for something more; I wanted to do something to make things better.”
On his ambitions as a youth, in an Academy of Achievement interview (28 October 2000) http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gor0int-1
1990s
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Mikhail Gorbachev 65
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1931Related quotes
“Anything was better than playing cards, and I was doing something I wanted to do — creating.”
On becoming a dance teacher, and creating her own moves, p. 44
My Heart Belongs (1976)
“I have something more to do than to feel.”
Letter to Coleridge (September 27, 1796), after the death of Lamb's mother.
McKenna interview (1992)
The "Burke quote" she uses here is a common but disputed attribution.
UN Speech on the HeForShe campaign (2014)
Context: You might be thinking who is this Harry Potter girl? And what is she doing speaking at the UN. And it’s a really good question. I've been asking myself the same thing. All I know is that I care about this problem. And I want to make it better.
And having seen what I’ve seen — and given the chance — I feel it is my responsibility to say something. Statesman Edmund Burke said: “All that is needed for the forces of evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.”
In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt I’ve told myself firmly — if not me, who, if not now, when. If you have similar doubts when opportunities are presented to you I hope that those words might be helpful.
Source: The Prime Minister (1876), Ch. 20
“Maggie Q’s Beautiful New Ads,” by PETA (29 September 2007) https://www.peta.org/blog/maggie-qs-beautiful-new-ads/.
Pretty Cool People interview (2007)
Context: I guess my favorite thing in the world is when I look at a piece of art, or read a story, or watch a movie where I walk away feeling like "Oh my god — I have to do something, I have to make something or talk to someone — things are not the same anymore" — and so I try to make work where you come away with that feeling. It's like, yeah, you're thinking about what you just saw, but even more than that — you feel able, you feel like, kind of propelled.
“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”