Quotes about anything
page 46

Chuck Jones photo
Randy Pausch photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Olly Blackburn photo

“I think when you’re shooting on such a tight budget and schedule, the insanity and the energy and the sense of spirit is what makes the experience unique. Ten percent more isn’t going to make enough of a difference and anything that would — double the budget, triple the time — then you’re making a different kind of film.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[Filmmaker Magazine, ”Donkey Punch” co-writer-director, Olly Blackburn, Jason, Guerrasio, 15 January 2008, 23 February 2012, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2008/01/donkey-punch-co-writer-director-olly-blackburn/, Independent Feature Project]

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Gertrude Stein photo
Richard T. Ely photo

“We have among us a class of mammon worshippers, whose one test of conservatism, or radicalism, is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what, they call socialism.”

Richard T. Ely (1854–1943) United States economist and author

Richard T. Ely, Socialism : an examination of its nature, its strength and its weakness, with suggestions for social reform http://archive.org/details/socialismanexam02goog (1894)
As quoted in: Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, basic history of the United States http://books.google.gr/books?id=vaQsAAAAMAAJ&q=A, Doubleday, Doran & company, 1944, p. 395.

Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze photo
Gerard Manley Hopkins photo

“When I compare myself, my being-myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

Charles Sanders Peirce photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo

“[S]laves are never referred to in the Constitution as anything but 'persons', a characterization that is perfectly neutral as to race or sex. That some of these persons were slaves was something arising from state law, not from the Constitution itself.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 211

Robert Todd Carroll photo
Muhammad Ali Jinnah photo
Mike Tyson photo

“I don't do anything. My life sucks.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Sports/2004/12/22/mike_tyson_my_life_sucks/8085/
On himself

Jeffrey Montgomery photo
Andy Partridge photo

“People will always be tempted
to wipe their feet
on anything with 'welcome'
written on it.”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Snowman"
English Settlement (1982)

Paul Newman photo

“I cannot bear to look at a film that I made before 1990. Maybe 1985. There's no sense even trying to explain it. I really just can't watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts, so I don't look at anything.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in John Hiscock, "Still the blue-eyed boy," http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/07/13/bfnewm13.xml The Telegraph (2002-07-13)

Max Horkheimer photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Waylon Jennings photo

“Let the world call me a fool,
But if things are right with me and you,
That's all that matters.
And I'll do anything you asked me to.”

Waylon Jennings (1937–2002) American country music singer, songwriter, and musician

You Asked Me To, from Honky Tonk Heroes, written with Billy Joe Shaver (1973).
Song lyrics

Pope Pius II photo
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo
Hermann Rauschning photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Samuel R. Delany photo
Pauline Kael photo
Robert Mitchum photo
David Brin photo
Bruce Cockburn photo
Luboš Motl photo

“In 1980 I was a red kid and no one could have said anything bad about the Soviet Union. At least this is how my grandfather used to remember me. Around 1981, I became a pro-capitalist person and it stuck.”

Luboš Motl (1973) Czech physicist and translator

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/06/helmut-schmidt-on-global-warming.html
The Reference Frame http://motls.blogspot.com/

Johnny Marr photo
La Fayette Grover photo
Bode Miller photo

“The silver medals I won in Salt Lake City didn’t give me anything. Last year I set myself the goal of winning the World Cup and lining up a long series of wins. It was my private challenge.”

Bode Miller (1977) American alpine ski racer

Interview with Gazzetta dello Sport, 16 Feb. 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385083/

Frank Lloyd Wright photo

“I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

Address at Evanston Illinois (8 August 1954)

Kim Stanley Robinson photo
Frank Sinatra photo

“The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything.”

Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) American singer and film actor

The Way You Wear Your Hat (1997)

Mortimer J. Adler photo
Umberto Boccioni photo
Ernie Banks photo

“Did you hear that? I didn't hear anything. Put that question another way.”

Ernie Banks (1931–2015) American baseball player and coach

Sports Illustrated (August 23, 1982).

Laura Bush photo
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis photo

“You know that anything -- Stas will take little Bobby to Africa -- I'll take them around the world + to the moon + back -- anything to help you + them now and always.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Undated letter to Ethel Kennedy following RFK's assassination, as quoted in "FBI seizes letter from Jackie Kennedy to RFK's widow" http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/14/texas.kennedy.letter/index.html (14 September 2009)

Nicholas Murray Butler photo

“When you remember how few Jews there are in Italy and how relatively few there are in Germany, one must wonder at the violence and the bitterness of this perse cution. The number of Jews in Italy is only a small fraction of those in the city of New York, while there are in the city of New York six times as many Jews as there were in the German Reich when the last war ended and possibly more than four times as many as there are there now. Yet the persecution, personal, physical, family, financial, goes on, openly and secretly, in a way that is perfectly appalling. To my great astonishment, this anti-Semitic persecution has been violently and publicly revived in this country within the last few weeks or months, and it is as discreditable to us that this should have happened as anything that we can imagine.'
Jews differ among themselves just as do Spaniards or Italians or Canadians or Americans. There are some who belong to one party, some who belong to another some whp hold one point of view, some who hold a point of view that is contradictory. The notion that all who belong to that race or profess that faith are of one mind in everything that relates to their public relationships is a grotesque departure from fact. But if you can play upon an excited public emotion by the use of these terms and by the insinuation that the entire Hebrew population is engaged, let us say as we have been told from the platform recently in trying to get this nation into war, such statements, although absolutely contradictory to every well-known fact, will, if repeated long enough, be believed and acted upon by a certain number of our unthinking population.
We cannot protest too vigorously and too strongly against that sort of thing. It may be the Ku Klux Klan persecuting the Catholics, it may be the anti-Semites persecuting the Jews: but persecution on racial or religious ground has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty and which calls itself a democracy.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

Theodore Dreiser photo

“Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought—the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this. She may change—Hell hath no fury, etc.—but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration—namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty.”

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXIII

Calvin Coolidge photo
Robert Fisk photo
Willie Nelson photo
Hugh Downs photo
Gottfried Leibniz photo

“Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?”
cur aliquid potius extiterit quam nihil

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

De rerum originatione radicali (1697); reprinted in God. Guil. Leibnitii Opera philosophica quae exstant latina, gallica, germanica omniaː 1 http://books.google.gr/books?id=Huv3Q0IimL0C&vq= (1840), p. 148
Cf. Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? (1929)ː "Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? Das ist die Frage."

“People accept their limitations so as to prevent themselves from wanting anything they might get.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

Lee Child photo
Susan Sontag photo
Anthony Trollope photo
George Washington Plunkitt photo
Douglas Adams photo
Dmitry Medvedev photo
Scott Lynch photo

“Maybe this is going to complicate the hell out of things. So what? You’re the complication I want more than anything else. You’re my favorite complication.”

Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 8 “The Five-Year Game: Infinite Variation” section 2 (p. 449)

Dylan Moran photo
John Bright photo
Piero Manzoni photo

“.. a single uninterrupted and continuous surface from which anything superfluous and all interpretative possibilities are excluded. [referring to his 'Achromes', Manzoni started to make in 1957]”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Quote of Manzoni, in Display Caption of 'Achrome' 1958 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/manzoni-achrome-t01871', Tate, July 2008]

Tobey Maguire photo

“I’ve been a vegetarian for 14 years now, and a lot of the time I avoid going to restaurants. I eat at home. … I’ve never had any desire to eat meat. In fact, when I was a kid I would have a really difficult time eating meat at all. It had to be the perfect bite, with no fat or gristle or bone or anything like that…. I don’t judge people who eat meat—that’s not for me to say—but the whole thing just sort of bums me out.”

Tobey Maguire (1975) actor from the United States

"Tobey Maguire - Web Exclusive", interview in Parade.com (1 April 2007) http://web.archive.org/web/20070930165114/http://www.parade.com/export/sites/default/articles/editions/2007/edition_04-01-2007/Tobey-Maguire. Quoted in "The Green Quote: Tobey Maguire Prefers To Eat At Home", in Ecorazzi.com (24 July 2008) http://www.ecorazzi.com/2008/07/24/the-green-quote-tobey-maguire-prefers-to-eat-at-home/.

John Scalzi photo

“When you control communication, you can hide anything you want.”

Source: The Last Colony (2007), Chapter 5 (p. 97)

Josh Homme photo
Dashiell Hammett photo

“Spade pulled his hand out of hers. He no longer either smiled or grimaced. His wet yellow face was set hard and deeply lined. His eyes burned madly. He said: "Listen. This isn't a damned bit of good. You'll never understand me, but I'll try once more and then we'll give it up. Listen. When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around – bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. Third, I'm a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it's not the natural thing. The only way I could have let you go was by letting Gutman and Cairo and the kid go. … Fourth, no matter what I wanted to do now it would be absolutely impossible for me to let you go without having myself dragged to the gallows with the others. Next, I've no reason in God's world to think I can trust you and if I did this and got away with it you'd have something on me that you could use whenever you happened to want to. That's five of them. The sixth would be that, since I've got something on you, I couldn't be sure you wouldn't decide to shoot a hole in *me* some day. Seventh, I don't even like the idea of thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that you'd played me for a sucker. And eighth – but that's enough. All those on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won't argue about that. But look at the number of them. Now on the other side we've got what? All we've got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you." … "But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won't. I've been through it before – when it lasted that long. Then what? Then I'll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over then I'd be sure I was the sap. Well, if I send you over I'll be sorry as hell – I'll have some rotten nights – but that'll pass. Listen." He took her by the shoulders and bent her back, leaning over her. "If that doesn't mean anything to you forget it and we'll make it this: I won't because all of me wants to – wants to say to hell with the consequences and do it -- and because – God damn you – you've counted on that with me the same as you counted on that with the others. … Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be. That kind of reputation might be good business – bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy. … Well, a lot of money would have been at least one more item on the other side of the scales."”

… Spade set the edges of his teeth together and said through them: "I won't play the sap for you."
Chap. 20, "If They Hang You"
spoken by the character "Sam Spade" to "Brigid O'Shaughnessy."
The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Rand Paul photo

“We could try freedom for a while. We had it for a long time. That's where you sell something and I agree to buy it because I like it. That is how we operate in most of rest of the marketplace other than health care. Now the president has said you can only buy certain types of health care that I approve of, and anything I don't approve of, you are not allowed to purchase. We could try freedom. I think it might work. It works everywhere else.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2015-01-05
Sen. Rand Paul's remedy for ObamaCare: 'We could try freedom for awhile. We had it for a long time'
Greta
Susteren
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/2015/01/06/sen-rand-pauls-remedy-obamacare-we-could-try-freedom-awhile-we-had-it-long-time
2015-03-01
2010s

Clarence Thomas photo
Augustus De Morgan photo
Nathaniel Lindley, Baron Lindley photo

“We hope this car will be less labor intensive, less material intensive, less everything intensive than anything we have done before.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

R.B. Smith cited in: Lloyd L. Byars (1987) Strategic management: planning and implementation : concepts and cases p. 150.
Smith was talking about the new cars of the Saturn Corporation, a new brand, established as subsidiary of General Motors begin 1985 in response to the success of Japanese automobile imports in the United States.

Sharron Angle photo
George S. Patton photo

“Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

This is cited to Patton in Patton's Principles : A Handbook for Managers Who Mean It! (1982) by Porter B. Williamson as well as Leadership (1990) by William Safire and Leonard Safir, p. 47, but is also cited to Erwin Rommel‎ from his Infanterie Greift An [Infantry Attacks] (1937) in World War II : The Definitive Visual History (2009) by Richard Holmes, p. 128, and Timelines of History (2011) by DK Publishing, p. 392
Disputed

George Gissing photo
Andrew Vachss photo
Aaron Sorkin photo

“Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.”

Aaron Sorkin (1961) American screenwriter, producer, playwright

The West Wing, Season Two Commentary Track: Noel.

Wilhelm Keitel photo

“I believe German soldiers are good and decent, and if they did anything wrong it was because of military necessity.”

Wilhelm Keitel (1882–1946) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, March 27, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Isocrates photo
Dave Matthews photo

“Crazy how it feels tonight
Crazy how you make it all alright love
You crush me with the things you do
And I do for you anything too.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Crush
Before These Crowded Streets (1998)

John Dewey photo
Louis-ferdinand Céline photo
Steve Shutt photo

“When you're playing, you don't worry about being in the Hall of Fame. When they come up and say, 'Hey, you've been inducted,' it was a thrill for everybody. You're being acknowledged by your peers and the people within the industry, and that's impressive because they're the hardest ones to convince. That, more than anything, gave me the greatest satisfaction.”

Steve Shutt (1952) ice hockey player

Quoted in Kevin Shea, "One on One with Steve Shutt," http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep199303.htm Legends of Hockey.net (2004-01-10)
Shutt comments about being elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Rhodri Morgan photo

“I think that Elin Jones made the point that that £450 million could have gone on health or anything else, but obviously the issue is that if you had another £450 million from somewhere else, you have got another £450 million, but what does that tell you? That is like saying, if my aunty was a bloke, she would be my uncle.”

Rhodri Morgan (1939–2017) British politician

Record of Proceedings http://www.wales.gov.uk/cms/2/ChamberSession/380313AC00046B17000028C300000000/N0000000000000000000000000042322.htm, National Assembly for Wales, 14 March 2006.
This statement was nominated for, but failed to win, the "Foot in Mouth" award in 2006.

Douglas Coupland photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Lew Rockwell photo
Condoleezza Rice photo

“Condoleezza Rice: I think that these historical circumstances require a very detailed and sober look from historians and what we've encouraged the Turks and the Armenians to do is to have joint historical commissions that can look at this, to have efforts to examine their past and, in examining their past, to get over their past.
Adam Schiff:… you come out of academia… is there any reputable historian you're aware of that takes issue with the fact that the murder of 1.5 million Armenians constituted genocide?
Condoleezza Rice: Congressman, I come out of academia, but I'm secretary of state now and I think that the best way to have this proceed is for the United States not to be in the position of making this judgment, but rather for the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this.
Adam Schiff:… Why is it only this genocide? Is it because Turkey is a strong ally? Is that an ethical and moral reason to ignore the murder of 1.5 million people? Why is it we don't say, "Let's relegate the Holocaust to historians" or "relegate the Cambodian genocide or Rwandan genocide?" Why is it only this genocide that we should let the Turks acknowledge or not acknowledge?
Condoleezza Rice: Congressman, we have recognized and the president recognizes every year in a resolution that he himself issues the historical circumstances and the tragedy that befell the Armenian people at that time…
Adam Schiff:… You recognize more than anyone, as a diplomat, the power of words. And I'm sure you supported the recognition of genocide in Darfur, not calling it tragedy, not calling it atrocity, not calling it anything else, but the power and significance of calling it genocide. Why is that less important in the case of the Armenian genocide?
Condoleezza Rice: Congressman, the power here is in helping these people to move forward… And, yes, Turkey is a good ally and that is important. But more important is that like many historical tragedies, like many historical circumstances of this kind, people need to come to terms with it and they need to move on.
Adam Schiff:… Iran hosts conferences of historians on the Holocaust. I don't think we want to get in the business of encouraging conferences of historians on the undeniable facts of the Armenian genocide.”

Condoleezza Rice (1954) American Republican politician; U.S. Secretary of State; political scientist

Appropriations hearing before the Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs http://schiff.house.gov/news/press-releases/schiff-presses-secretary-of-state-rice-on-armenian-genocide-recognition, March 21, 2007.

Adolf Eichmann photo

“The war with the Soviet Union began in June 1941, I think. And I believe it was two months later, or maybe three, that Heydrich sent for me. I reported. He said to me: "The Führer has ordered physical extermination." These were his words. And as though wanting to test their effect on me, he made a long pause, which was not at all his way. I can still remember that. In the first moment, I didn't grasp the implications, because he chose his words so carefully. But then I understood. I didn't say anything, what could I say? Because I'd never thought of a … of such a thing, of that sort of violent solution. … Anyway, Heydrich said: "Go and see Globocnik, the Führer has already given him instructions. Take a look and see how he's getting on with his program. I believe he's using Russian anti-tank trenches for exterminating the Jews." As ordered, I went to Lublin, located the headquarters of SS and Police Commander Globocnik, and reported to the Gruppenführer. I told him Heydrich had sent me, because the Führer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews. … Globocnik sent for a certain Sturmbannführer Höfle, who must have been a member of his staff. We went from Lublin to, I don't remember what the place was called, I get them mixed up, I couldn't say if it was Treblinka or some other place. There were patches of woods, sort of, and the road passed through — a Polish highway. On the right side of the road there was an ordinary house, that's where the men who worked there lived. A captain of the Ordnungspolizei welcomed us. A few workmen were still there. The captain, which surprised me, had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, somehow he seemed to have joined in the work. They were building little wooden shacks, two, maybe three of them; they looked like two- or three-room cottages. Höfle told the police captain to explain the installation to me. And then he started in. He had a, well, let's say, a vulgar, uncultivated voice. Maybe he drank. He spoke some dialect from the southwestern corner of Germany, and he told me how he had made everything airtight. It seems they were going to hook up a Russian submarine engine and pipe the exhaust into the houses and the Jews inside would be poisoned.
I was horrified. My nerves aren't strong enough … I can't listen to such things… such things, without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away. I could never have been a doctor. I still remember how I visualized the scene and began to tremble, as if I'd been through something, some terrible experience. The kind of thing that happens sometimes and afterwards you start to shake. Then I went to Berlin and reported to the head of the Security Police.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Source: Eichmann Interrogated (1983), p. 75 - 76.

Gebran Tueni photo

“We are on the edge of a new era. It can be something completely positive for Lebanon, and it can be something completely dark for Lebanon. … That's why we are really at a turning point where anything can happen.”

Gebran Tueni (1957–2005) journalist

Associated Press interview, May 2000
This followed the withdrawl of Israeli troops from Lebanon.