Quotes about anybody

Variant: Just keep moving forward and don't give a shit about what anybody thinks. Do what you have to do, for you.

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LXVI
Following the Equator (1897)

Source: A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas

The Third Notebook: Part Two
No Longer Human

Unsourced in Musician's Little Book of Wisdom‎ (1996) by Scott E. Power, Quote 416.
Misattributed

Variant: Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You do not have to have a college degree to serve. You do not have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

LeBron James sees 'karma' in Cavs rout, Steve Ginsburg, ESPN, January 12, 2011 http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/truehoop/miamiheat/news/story?id=6014004,
James on Twitter after the Cleveland Cavaliers lost 112–57 to the Los Angeles Lakers.

Variant: I think art is the only thing that's spirtual in the world. And I refuse to be forced to believe in other people's interpretations of God. I don't think anybody should be. No one person can own the copyright to what God means.

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 26

Context: Grace Jones said this to me when I met her. I washed her feet, and I looked up at her and she said, "No matter what you do in your life, don’t you ever let anybody take your creative people away from you." And what my creative friends always remind me of is they say, "Only value the opinion of those that you respect. And anyone that you don’t respect, pay no mind to their opinion about you or anything else." And that’s how I live my life. If I worried about everything that everyone said, I would not be a good artist.

On Mary Austin, a long time companion, and the inheritor of most of his estate, as quoted in "For A Song : The Mercury that's rising in rock is Freddie the satiny seductor of Queen" by Fred Hauptfuhrer, in People magazine (5 December 1977) http://www.queenarchives.com/index.php?title=Group_-_12-05-1977_-_People

Ian Smith - A Bit Of A Rebel, Ian Smith

A popular toast or slogan at J. J. Thomson's Cavendish Laboratory in the first years of the 1900s, as quoted in Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Volume 35 (1951), p. 251.
Attributed

Louisville, Kentucky http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/louisville-kentucky-jun2594.html (June 25, 1994)
In Concert

Cathy Hainer (October 28, 1993) "PBS' stroke of serenity / Bob Ross brings brush of zen to 'Joy of Painting'", USA Today, p. 3D.

HUAC Testimony

Interviewed by the "Chicago SEED", November 1968

Then & Now: Magic Johnson http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/01/17/cnn25.tan.johnson/index.html

Letter to Catherine L. Moore (7 February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 407-408
Non-Fiction, Letters

"Emily Webb"
Our Town (1938)
Context: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.... Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?... I'm ready to go back... I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.

Variant: I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Source: Emile or On Education

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Part Two, Ch. 4
On the Road (1957)

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Source: The Bell Jar

Upon winning his eighth straight Gold medal and having set his eighth straight Olympic record, as well as his seventh world record, in his eight events in the 2008 Olympic Games, 17 August 2008. (Source: [Phelps wins historic eighth gold medal, CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2008/SPORT/08/17/phelps.history.eight.golds/])

Linda Shrieves (July 7, 1990) "Bob Ross Uses His Brush to Spread Paint and Joy", The Orlando Sentinel, p. E1.

Interview with Robin Denselow (May 2008)
Source: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2280144,00.html, Robin Denselow talks to African superstar and activist Miriam Makeba, The Guardian, 15, London, 16 May 2008, 18 November 2010

" 'I Am at Home' Says Robeson at Reception in Soviet Union http://www.mltranslations.org/Miscellaneous/RobesonSU.htm", Daily Worker (15 January 1935)

"As I Please" column in The Tribune (15 November 1946)^{http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/}
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

Interview with ShortList, 2015 http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/sport/lionel-messi-talks-champions-league-copa-america

Lecture: "Off the Time Track" (June 1952) as quoted in Journal of Scientology issue 18-G, reprinted in Technical Volumes of Dianetics & Scientology Vol. 1, p. 418.

Można powiedzieć, że byłem gdzieś niezręczny, może nawet kogoś wsypałem, ale nie to, że byłem agentem. Nie to, że chciałem kogoś zdradzić (...) Przysięgam i niech mnie szlag trafi, jeśli kłamię.
From the IV Copernican Debate at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, after Gazeta.pl http://miasta.gazeta.pl/torun/1,48723,6510083,Walesa__Przysiegam__ze_nie_bylem_agentem.html and TVN24 http://www.tvn24.pl/1,1596041,druk.html

YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIPZ3dHD4Y&feature=player_embedded

1960s, I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968)

What US leaders have never understood about Iran http://nypost.com/2015/07/19/what-us-leaders-have-never-understood-about-iran/, New York Post (July 19, 2015).
New York Post

Oppenheimer testifying in his defense in his 1954 security hearings, discussing the American reaction to the first successful Russian test of an atomic bomb and the debate whether to develop the "super" hydrogen bombs with vastly higher explosive power; from volume II of the Oppenheimer hearing transcripts http://www.osti.gov/includes/opennet/includes/Oppenheimer%20hearings/Vol%20II%20Oppenheimer.pdf, pg 95/266 (emphasis added)

Having just been sentenced to death, 1948.
Source: Ewa K. Czaczkowska, Chcą beatyfikacji Pileckiego, Rzeczpospolita. Nr 249 (8150), 24 October 2008, p. A9

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

Rolling Stone (1976)
1970s
Context: I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright... Or maybe "stupid" is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I... And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.

Living, Loving, and Learning (1982)
Context: About two years ago a young lady came into my office, and I knew immediately something was wrong. Her eyes were kind of glazed, and her head was nodding, and I asked, "What's the matter" She replied, "Oh, Dr. Buscaglia, in order to get enough courage to come to see you, I had to drink a whole bottle of Ripple! And I think I am going to be sick!" Imagining... having to drink a bottle of Ripple to summon up the courage to come to see me. All I do is put my hands out and say, "Hi." I cover their hands with mine and lead them into my office, and I can see a look of panic on their faces, "What's he going to do to me?" I am not going to do anything to you! I just want you to know that I cry, too, and I feel, too, and I care, too, and I don't know everything, too, and therefore, we can start with a common frame of reference — human being to human being. If anybody tries to play the game of "follow the guru" with me, they will be lost, for they will learn that I am just as confused as they are. The difference may be that I know it. A Buddhist teacher once said to me, "Why do you keep moving? You are already there." And all of a sudden it occurred to me — my goodness, I am!

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Let us not violate the RIGHT of the artist to express exclusively his own experiences and introspections, disregarding everything that happens in the world beyond. Let us not DEMAND of the artist, but — reproach, beg, urge and entice him — that we may be allowed to do. After all, only in part does he himself develop his talent; the greater part of it is blown into him at birth as a finished product, and the gift of talent imposes responsibility on his free will. Let us assume that the artist does not OWE anybody anything: nevertheless, it is painful to see how, by retiring into his self-made worlds or the spaces of his subjective whims, he CAN surrender the real world into the hands of men who are mercenary, if not worthless, if not insane.

God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth (1989) YouTube video of the lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBEIeRSLb8k
Context: It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction. Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly — seventy years will be gone soon. Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears. But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth — not a belief — is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.

Introducing "If It Be Your Will"
Warsaw concert (1985)
Context: I don't know which side is anybody on any more. I don't really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we're on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order. That doesn't mean that I don't wish you courage in your struggle. There is on both sides of the struggle men of good will. That is important to remember. On both sides of the struggle, some struggling for freedom, some struggling for safety and solemn testimony of that unbroken faith which binds generations one to another I sing this song, "If It Be Your Will"

Variant: Everyones got to be different. You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing.
Source: Lady Sings the Blues

Source: A Woman of No Importance

Source: The Woman in the Dunes

Source: The Bell Jar

Variant: You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
Source: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

Source: Forrest Gump

Reported as an inscription quoting Lincoln in an English college in The Baptist Teacher for Sunday-school Workers : Vol. 36 (August 1905), p. 483. The portion beginning with "stand with anybody..." is from the 16 October 1854 Peoria speech..
Posthumous attributions

1850s, Speech at Peoria, Illinois (1854)

Statement to the press in July 1969 after the release of the Plastic Ono Band's single "Give Peace a Chance", as quoted in The Beatles: An Oral History by David Pritchard and Alan Lysaght (1998) New York: Hyperion. ISBN: 0786864362. OCLC: 39093547. p. 285.
Context: It was just a gradual development over the years. Last year was "All You Need Is Love." This year it's "Give Peace a Chance." Remember love. The only hope for any of us is peace. Violence begets violence. If you want to get peace, you can get it as soon as you like if we all pull together. You're all geniuses and you're all beautiful. You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace. Think peace, live peace, and breathe peace and you'll get it as soon as you like. Okay?

Source: Shrek!

Source: Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

Source: The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Variant: The best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them.

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

Source: Wintersmith

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Source: Of Mystics & Mistakes

Variant: Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

Carlin on Campus (1984)

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

Source: Principle-Centered Leadership (1992), Ch. 11
Context: Unless we exercise our power to choose wisely, our actions will be determined by conditions. Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.