Quotes about real
page 29

Willa Cather photo
Northrop Frye photo
Yvonne De Carlo photo

“I enjoyed the comedies with Alec Guinness, and I had a real great time with Peter Ustinov in Hotel Sahara. I found I had the ability to do comedy. My timing was really inborn.”

Yvonne De Carlo (1922–2007) Canadian-American actress, dancer, and singer

"Yvonne De Carlo Reminds The World There Was Life Before Lily Munster" (1987)

Tony Abbott photo

“The argument [behind climate change] is absolute crap. However, the politics of this are tough for us. Eighty per cent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Remarks quoted by Craig Wilson, editor of the Pyrenees Advocate, quoted in "Town of Beaufort changed Tony Abbott's view on climate change" http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/the-town-that-turned-up-the-temperature/story-e6frgczf-1225809567009 in the Australian, December 12, 2009. [no recording was made, and accounts differ of the precise wording].
2009

Edgar Degas photo
Pearl S.  Buck photo
Henry Adams photo
William Saroyan photo

“Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that.
Young Shaw, hello out there.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

In the The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952) Saroyan additionally wrote of Shaw:
He was a gentle, delicate, kind, little man who had established a pose, and then lived it so steadily and effectively that the pose had become real. Like myself, his nature has been obviously a deeply troubled one in the beginning. He had been a man who had seen the futility, meaninglessness and sorrow of life but had permitted himself to thrust aside these feelings and to perform another George Bernard Shaw, which is art and proper.
Hello Out There (1941)

John Reed (novelist) photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“You're going to have a deportation force, and you're going to do it humanely and you're going to bring the country -- and, frankly, the people, because you have some excellent, wonderful people, some fantastic people hat have been here for a long period of time. Don't forget, Mika, that you have millions of people that are waiting in line to come into this country and they're waiting to come in legally. And I always say the wall, we're going to build the wall. It's going to be a real deal. It's going to be a real wall. There was a picture in one of the magazines where they had a wall this tall and they were taking drugs over the wall. They built a ramp over the wall and the truck was going up and down. They were using it like a highway; the wall is like a highway. It's not going to happen. It's going to be a Trump wall. It's going to be a real wall. And it's going to stop people and it's going to be good. But your friend Thomas Friedman called me and said, hah, there should be a big door. I said going to be a big door. I love the expression. There's going to be a big beautiful nice door. People are going to come in and they're going to come in legally. But we have no choice. Otherwise, we don't have a country. We don't even know how many people. We don't know if it's 8 million or if it's 20 million. We have no idea how many people are in our country. And then you see what happened with Kate in San Francisco. You see what happens with all of the things going on, all of the tremendous crime going on. It costs us $200 billion a year for illegal immigration right now. $200 billion a year, maybe $250, maybe $300. They don't even know. We're going to stop it. We're going to run it properly and we're going to stop it.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

On his immigration plan (2015 November 11)
2010s, 2015

“(Sylvia) You almost never see a real lady popping out of a cake.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 30

Agatha Christie photo
Ralph Ellison photo
Fritz Leiber photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.”

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 39

“When the rate of change increases to the point that real time required to assimilate change exceeds the time in with change must be manifest, the enterprise is going to find itself in deep yogurt.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Zachman (1994) cited in: Ronald G. Ross (2003) Principles of the Business Rule Approach. p. 35

Gerald Ford photo
James Frey photo
Piet Mondrian photo
Gertrude Stein photo

“Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"The Situation in American Writing," Partisan Review (Summer 1939)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

Leonid Brezhnev photo

“We are entirely for the idea that Europe shall be free from nuclear weapons, from medium-range weapons as well as tactical weapons. That would be a real zero option.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Nuclear War: The Search for Solutions (1985) by Leonard V. Johnson, Helen Caldicott, Thomas L. Perry and Dianne DeMille

Woodrow Wilson photo

“Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech in Cleveland http://books.google.com/books?id=o3j10P6YFZIC&pg=PA1090&dq=%22nation's+honor+is+dearer+than+the+nation's+comfort%22 (January 1916)
1910s

Jane Roberts photo
Aron Ra photo
Tenzin Gyatso photo
Vyasa photo
Leo Buscaglia photo
Sidney Hillman photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Ann Richards photo

“I am delighted to be here with you this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like.”

Ann Richards (1933–2006) American politician

1988 Democratic National Convention keynote address
1988
Source: Transcript of the Keynote Address by Ann Richards, the Texas Treasurer, The New York Times, July 19, 1988, 2006-09-16 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/19/us/text-richards.html?pagewanted=print,

Zephyr Teachout photo

“The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to.”

Zephyr Teachout (1971) American academic, political activist and candidate

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was an utter sham https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/mark-zuckerbergs-facebook-hearing-sham?CMP=fb_gu (11 April 2018), The Guardian.

Donald J. Trump photo

“If you start adding it up, our real unemployment rate is 42%.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2015-08-20
Donald Trump Explains All
TIME
http://time.com/4003734/donald-trump-interview-transcript/. For a discussion of this figure, see "The Real Jobless Rate Is 42 Percent? Donald Trump Has a Point, Sort Of" http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/upshot/the-real-jobless-rate-is-42-percent-donald-trump-has-a-point-sort-of.html?_r=0 by Neil Irwin, The New York Times (10 February 2016).
2010s, 2015

Mark Burns (televangelist) photo

“In reference to dealing with black issues and dealing with issues that plague those minority communities, Donald Trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body. I know what real racism is. And Donald Trump is so far from it. Talking to him and his wonderful wife and his children is like hanging out with some friends of mine that are black … He's just that kind of a person. He is not uneasy around you. He's very relaxed… When Donald Trump talks about 'the blacks' he's talking about the blacks, the group as a whole. He's talking about the groups… No, it doesn't bother me, because I know Donald Trump. I know who he is. I know he is not at all speaking in any derogatory sense at all. He's simply talking to that ethnic group, the blacks or the whites… Even with a sitting black President, the racial tension in this country is at an all-time high. And I believe it's led by the Democratic party and led by President Barack Obama, and obviously Secretary Clinton desires to continue that torch, which I believe will lead us more and more into economic destruction, especially for minorities in this country… I have not experienced racist tension from Donald Trump. I'm from the South. Literally right over the next county, there are active KKK groups that parade their rebel flag on a daily basis… This is in 2016. Right now, today, with a sitting black President. So I know what real racism looks like. And it is not Donald Trump… Does he want it (ex-KKK leaders endorsement)? He said, 'No, I don't want it, I don't accept it.' … He doesn't stand for any hate groups, whether it be a Christian hate group or an Islam hate group. He's already stated this. Mr. Trump has already stated that there was a technical issue in the earpiece. I'm in television; I own a TV studio. I do know how technical issues can cause you to miss out on what someone is saying.”

Mark Burns (televangelist) (1979) Christian pastor and founder of the NOW Television Network

Interview, New York Daily News, 15 May 2016 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/meet-female-muslim-mexican-american-trump-supporters-article-1.2637077

Rekha photo
Gustave Moreau photo
John C. Wright photo

“Were I a real master of intrigue, I would not have the reputation for being a master of intrigue.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Fugitives of Chaos (2006), Chapter 17, “The Ire of the Heavens” (p. 260)

Salman Khan photo
John F. Kennedy photo
William James photo
Alexis De Tocqueville photo

“Égalité is an expression of envy. It means, in the real heart of every Republican, " No one shall be better off than I am;" and while this is preferred to good government, good government is impossible.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Original text (incomplete): L'égalité est une expression d'envie. Elle signifie, dans le cœur de tout républicain : personne ne sera dans une meilleure situation que moi.[...]
Conversation with Nassau William Senior, 22 May 1850 Nassau, p. 94 http://books.google.com/books?id=KuzvHHBxuqgC&pg=PA94&vq=%22an+expression+of+envy%22&dq=tocqueville+william+nassau&lr=&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0
1850s and later
Variant: Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every republican: "Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I."

Ernest Solvay photo

“To be in contact with scientists, to become in a small way a scientist myself if possible, perhaps to cast new light on physical phenomena, to be able to uncover what is real and definitive, was my life's great dream.”

Ernest Solvay (1838–1922) Belgian chemist, industrialist, philanthropist

quoted by [Pierre Marage, Grégoire Wallenborn, The Solvay Councils and the Birth of Modern Physics, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1999, 3-764-35705-3]

Richard Dedekind photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Barry Goldwater photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Theo van Doesburg photo
Geert Wilders photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Paz de la Huerta photo

“I love the fact that the present is the only real reality we have.”

Paz de la Huerta (1984) American actress

Blackbookmag interview http://www.blackbookmag.com/movies/paz-de-la-huerta-bares-all-1.28620

Norodom Sihanouk photo

“I am asking the U. S. A and Great Britain if, just for once, they will kindly consider the problem of Cambodia from the viewpoint of the Khmers instead of that of the French… My people will tell you: 'We don't know what communist slavery means. But the slavery imposed by the French we know well, for we are now living under it. If we fight alongside the French against the Viet Minh and the Issaraks, we are simply strengthening the chains of that slavery…' [The problem is that] in Indochina, you are either a communist or a lackey of the French: there is no middle course. We are not allowed to hope for an independence like that of India or Pakistan within the British Commonwealth… The question is: Does French military power on its own have any chance of defeating communism in Indochina? To fight without having the autochtonous population on one's side makes no sense… What is at stake in this struggle, and what will determine its outcome, is the [native] population. The Viet Minh have understood that from the start. If we [who oppose communism] wish to have the population with us, we must… make [our country's] independence… real and unquestionable, so that [no one] will listen any more to the Viet Minh propaganda about 'liberation'… This is the whole problem. It is a political matter. It has nothing to do with the science of war… If France does not boldly face up to [this]… then one day, sooner or later, it will be forced to abdicate from Indochina.”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

Secret memorandum drafted for the American and British legations (1953), as quoted in Philip Short (2004) Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare, pages 92-93.
Speeches

Edward Jenks photo
Albert Camus photo
Alexandra Kollontai photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Ernest King photo
Christopher Monckton photo

“Not greatly to my surprise—indeed I predicted it—the satellite crashed on take-off because the last thing they [NASA] want is real world hard data.”

Christopher Monckton (1952) British public speaker and hereditary peer

Attributed by Adam Morton http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-sceptic-clouds-the-weather-issue-20100201-n8y3.html, reporting in The Age, about a speaking engagement in which Lord Monckton implied that NASA had sabotaged a Taurus rocket in order to prevent the Orbiting Carbon Observatory from reaching space.
Attributed

Asger Jorn photo
Aron Ra photo
Will Eisner photo

“The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyage through life? No. 55 sat at the corner of Dropsie avenue near the elevated train, or the elevated as we called it in those days. It was a treasure house of stories that illustrated tenement life as I remembered it, stories that needed to be told before they faded from memory. Within its “railroad flats,” with rooms strung together train-like lived low-paid city employees or laborers and their turbulent families. Most were recent immigrants, intent n their own survival. They kept busy raising children and dreaming of the better lie they knew existed “uptown.” Hallways were filled with a rich stew of cooking aromas, sounds of arguments and the tinny wail from Victrolas. What community spirit there was stemmed from the common hostility of tenants to the landlord or his surrogate superintendent. Typically, the buildings tenants came and went with regularity, depending on the vagaries of their fortunes But many remained for a lifetime, imprisoned by poverty or old age. There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witness like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XV-XVI, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Richard Dedekind photo
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen photo
Raya Dunayevskaya photo
Alex Jones photo

“If I'm in, you know, especially in a poor area, and I see guys walking like they're thugs down the street, I don't care what color they are, I go "That guy looks like they're a thug, and looks like they're tough, okay… If they try to shake me down I'm gonna ignore them and keep walking, and if they come up to me and try to put a hand on me, I'm gonna punch 'em right in the throat. 'Cause I don't wanna jump on top on of 'em and hurt my knees and stuff, when I slam their head in the ground. Plus, I don't wanna kill 'em. 'Cause then I'd have to go to jail and stuff, and they'd have to find that it was done in self defense. Been down that road." So, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, "Alright. I'm gonna punch this guy in the throat." I'm thinking how hard am I gonna punch him. And I'm not thinking he's a black guy. I'm thinking the guy's walking like a thug, thinks they're tough, and I'm thinking about how I'm going to defend myself. Just like when I've been at the Coast, a few years ago, and walk out of a restaurant in South Padre and they're having a biker rally—and it wasn't like a nice biker rally, most rallies are nice people—it was like thug wannabes, rode up with a motorcycle…and were looking at me, and I was thinking "Okay. Alright. That guy is taking his helmet off. I'm gonna punch him in the throat the minute he tries to get up and do something, and then I'm gonna assault those next three guys. Then they'll probably pull a weapon. I need to take that." I mean, that's what I'm thinking whenever something like that is going on. I can't help it. I'm thinking, "Alright, I'm ready to kill." That's just how I am. And I'm thinking, "Alright. Okay. Instantly assess these guys. These are probably ex-con, real criminals. I've got my three kids here. That gives me, you know, just turbo dinosaur power. And I'm thinking, "Control yourself. Don't have a fight, unless you absolutely got to."”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

You know, the man in me is ready to take all on! and... you know what I'm talking about, don't you? ARGH, you scum! I hate gang members and filth! And it has nothing to do with black people. But I will stump your head in if you start a fight with me, you thug scum! Anyways, excuse me ladies and gentlemen.
"Alex Jones Self-Defense Rant" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMJ_pxy2eU, July 2013.
2013

Ellen Willis photo
Pauline Kael photo

“At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films — the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us — that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it's eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?”

"Stanley Strangelove" (January 1972) http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0051.html, review of A Clockwork Orange
Deeper into Movies (1973)

Brian Leiter photo
Naum Gabo photo
Harry Chapin photo

“You see, I have no real complaints of how you've left your past behind
I guess what gets me worried is you've erased him from your mind.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

I Wonder What Happened to Him
Song lyrics, Dance Band on the Titanic (1977)

John Derbyshire photo
Gideon Mantell photo
Phil Brooks photo

“Hey Rob. I think you should challenge a real New Breed Leader. Me!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Extreme Championship Wrestling. April 17th, 2007.
Extreme Championship Wrestling

Calvin Coolidge photo
Mata Amritanandamayi photo

“The real installation of God has to be done within one’s heart.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

About God (25 Apr '15)

Marshall McLuhan photo

“There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 223
1950s

“It's a shame that pantyless party girls get more attention than the real heroes, the nurses and teachers and moms.”

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter six, More is Less, p. 183

George Holmes Howison photo

“To the question, What is the right relation between reason and religion, you will now understand me to answer, It is that reason should be the source of which religion is the issue; that reason, when most itself, will unquestionably be religious, but that religion must for just that cause be entirely rational; that reason is the final authority from which religion must derive its warrant, and with which its contents must comply; that all religious doctrines and instrumentalities, all religious practices, all religious institutions, and all records of religion, whether in tradition or in scripture, must alike submit their claims at the bar of general human reason, and that only those approved in that tribunal can be regarded as of weight or of obligation; in short, that the only real basis of religion is our human reason, the only seat of its authority our genuine human nature, the only sufficient witness of God the human soul. Reason, I shall endeavour to show, is not confined to the mastery of the sense-world and the goods of this world only, but does cover all the range of being, and found and rule the world eternal; it is not merely natural, it is also spiritual; it is itself, when come to itself, the true divine revelation.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.224-5

Robert Owen photo
William Saroyan photo

“My work is writing, but my real work is being.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Obituaries (1979)

William H. McNeill photo
Phillip Guston photo
Mandell Creighton photo
François Bernier photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Bk. III, ch. 8.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

Fred Hoyle photo