Quotes about somebody
page 16

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Donald Rumsfeld photo

“And the only way there’s going to be followers, is if the leader is doing things that have merit, that are persuasive to others. Why else would someone follow somebody if they didn’t think the individual was doing something worthwhile, going in the right direction?”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

As quoted in "My Date With Rummy: Now 84, The Former Secretary Of Defense Is As Wily As Ever" https://taskandpurpose.com/donald-rumsfeld-secretary-defense (12 June 2017), by Adam Linehan, Task & Purpose
2010s

Stanisław Lem photo

“For moral reasons I am an atheist — for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.”

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author

From Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, Volume VII, Number 2 (1984) http://www.missourireview.org/index.php?genre=Interviews&title=An+Interview+with+Stanislaw+Lem

Ta-Nehisi Coates photo
Ta-Nehisi Coates photo

“Rich people seldom run amok; They hire somebody to do that for them.”

Steve Perry (1947) American writer

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 5

“Nobody is a born killer. And nobody ever forgets the first time they get laid, nor the first time they spike somebody.”

Steve Perry (1947) American writer

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 16

Clinton Edgar Woods photo
James K. Morrow photo

“On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

“It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.”
Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 9 (p. 112)

Mike Huckabee photo
John Terry photo

“John is naturally somebody who attracts people to follow him, You know how you can dress any way you want, but if you don’t have natural style, it doesn’t matter? John has that leadership naturally.”

John Terry (1980) English association football player

Marcel Desailly, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/sports/soccer/john-terry-chelseas-dark-knight.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Vandana Shiva photo

“When you call somebody a fraud, that suggests the person knows she is lying. I don’t think Vandana Shiva necessarily knows that. But she is blinded by her ideology and her political beliefs. That is why she is so effective and so dangerous.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

Mark Lynas, journalist and environmental activist, as quoted in " Seeds of Doubt http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt" by Michael Specter, The New Yorker (25 August 2014)

Roman Polanski photo

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!”

Roman Polanski (1933) Polish-French film director, producer, writer, actor, and rapist

Interview https://books.google.ca/books?id=umhoFsnYri8C with Martin Amis (1979), published in Visiting Mrs Nabokov : And Other Excursions (1993), this was modified to censor the word "fuck" when quoted in "Roman Polanski: 'Everyone else fancies little girls too'" by Michael Deacon http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/michaeldeacon/100011795/roman-polanski-everyone-else-fancies-little-girls-too/

Thom Yorke photo

“Jonny goes on and on about this. Anybody who claims they write for *themselves is a liar. Everyone has an audience in mind. The only reason any artist would carry on is in the faith that one day somebody would see or hear their work.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://www.followmearound.com/presscuttings.php?year=1997&cutting=46

Oprah Winfrey photo

“All the energy that you spend, trying to hurt somebody else, that energy will turn around and slap you in the face. The same thing is true, Love, what I know is that the energy that put out everyday with the best of intentions that it would reach you where you really live in heart of yourself has come back to me from all of you in full force.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

So that what we've learnt on this show; You are responsible for your life and when you get that, everything changes, my friends. So don't wait for somebody else to fix you, to save you or complete you...
"Oprah Winfrey Show Finale" in CBS (25 May 2011)

Richard Dawkins photo

“An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins on militant atheism http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html, (February 2002)

Richard Sherman (American football) photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Steven Crowder photo
Steve Jobs photo

“The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?"”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. … It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are "slash q-zs" and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.
1980s, Playboy interview (1985)

G. K. Chesterton photo

“…If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."
"Why?" cried Merton amused. "Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?”

"People like frequent laughter," answered Father Brown, "but I don't think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing."
The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Three Tools of Death
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

Steven Wright photo

“About five years ago, somebody showed me some web sites that had my material all over them, and I thought that was fascinating. One reason was, I'd never seen my jokes written one right after another like that. I write on drawing paper—I don't even like lines on the paper—so I have notebooks all over the place with handwritten pieces of my act in them. So to see it go by, all typed out neatly, was like, "Wow."”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

And then two or three years ago, someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn't write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn't write any of it. What's disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I'm embarrassed that people think I thought of them, because some are really bad.
[The Tenacity of the Cockroach: Conversations with Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders, Thompson, Steven, 2002, Three Rivers Press, 0609809911, September 9, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/steven-wright,13796/]
Interviews

Bill Withers photo
Bill Withers photo

“Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on.”

Bill Withers (1938–2020) American singer-songwriter and musician

"Lean on Me", on Still Bill (1972)

Joe Biden photo

“When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well. I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans' benefits. I meant every single, solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time and I tried it a fourth time. Somebody has to tell me in here, how we're going to do this hard work without dealing with any of those sacred cows.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Senate, , quoted with video in * 2019-05-20

Watch: Joe Biden Once Boasted About Wanting to Cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans’ Benefits

Walker Bragman

Paste Magazine

https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/joe-biden/watch-joe-biden-boasts-about-wanting-to-cut-social/
1990s

William Lane Craig photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Joanna Trollope photo

“For all that somebody gets dumped every nanosecond in the world, you don’t want to be lumped in with everybody else – you want it to be expressed as poignantly and vividly as you feel it yourself…A cliche is only a cliche if it’s happening in someone else’s life.”

Joanna Trollope (1943) British writer

On how people react to her characters in “Joanna Trollope on families, fiction and feminism: ‘Society still expects women to do all the caring’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/02/joanna-trollope-on-families-fiction-and-feminism-society-still-expects-women-to-do-all-the-caring in The Guardian (2020 Mar 2)

Donna Strickland photo

“If somebody else thinks something that you don't believe in, just think they're wrong and you're right and keep going. That's pretty much the way I always think.”

Donna Strickland (1959) Canadian physicist, 2018 Nobel prize winner

In [Casey, Liam, 'We are marching forward': Canadian scientist becomes third woman to win Nobel Prize in physics, https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/we-are-marching-forward-canadian-scientist-becomes-third-woman-to-win-nobel-prize-in-physics-1.4117566, 5 October 2018, CTV News Toronto, October 2, 2018]

Jackson Browne photo

“You never knew what I loved in you
I dont know what you loved in me
Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be”

Jackson Browne (1948) American singer-songwriter

Late for the Sky from Late for the Sky (1974)

Jackson Browne photo
Elon Musk photo
Kathleen Wynne photo

“If you don’t vote, then somebody who looks like me is going to vote, some senior person, older than me, some white person.”

Kathleen Wynne (1953) 25th Premier of Ontario

19 March 2018 Wynne demonizes old, white voters in grasp for votes http://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/agar-wynne-demonizes-old-white-voters-in-grasp-for-votes

Donald J. Trump photo

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made [[America] what it is today. Big impact”

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

2010s, 2017, February
Source: Donald Trump's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/frederick-douglass-trump/515292/ February 1, 2017

Donald J. Trump photo

“Somebody said I’m the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.”

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

Quoted by * 2015-11-20
Trump says he’s the Hemingway of Twitter
The Hill
Bradford Richardson
https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/260949-trump-says-hes-the-hemingway-of-twitter
2010s, 2015

Ernest Becker photo

“[W]e understand that if the child were to give in to the overpowering character of reality and experience he would not be able to act with the kind of equanimity we need in our non-instinctive world. So one of the first things a child has to do is to learn to “abandon ecstasy,” to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say “naturalized” but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden, a despair that the child glimpses in his night terrors and daytime phobias and neuroses. This despair he avoids by building defenses; and these defenses allow him to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power. They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody—not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet that Carlyle for all time called a “hall of doom.””

We called one’s life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation. This revelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up in and is the basic reason that we still strain against Freud We don’t want to admit that we arerevelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up in and is the basic reason that we still strain against Freud. We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.
Human Character as a Vital Lie
The Denial of Death (1973)

“I think if anything is malicious… when somebody can look at harvesting and selling the little heart… of a baby who has been freshly killed — if someone can look at trading that body part for money — if anything is malicious, I think that’s malicious: treating people like things.”

David Daleiden (1989) American anti-abortion activist

Undercover Planned Parenthood investigator David Daleiden: ‘No one is going to be able to say anymore that they didn’t know’ https://www.liveaction.org/news/undercover-investigator-planned-parenthood-daleiden-know/ (June 7, 2020)

John Cooper Clarke photo
J. Howard Moore photo
Douglas Murray photo
David Cay Johnston photo
Sam Peckinpah photo

“We've all grown up with the idea that gunning a man down is just fun and games. All of us, as kids, played cops and robbers, with toy pistols or pointing a finger at somebody and saying, "Bang, Bang. You're dead!"”

Sam Peckinpah (1925–1984) American film director and screenwriter

Both the movies and television have perpetuated the idea that shooting a man is clean and quick and simple, and when he falls down there is only a small hole, or a blood-stain, to show how he died. Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games maybe we'll get somewhere about violence on the screen in the first place. [...] No, I don't like violence. In fact, when I look at the film myself, I find it unbearable. I don't think I'll be able to see it again for five years.
Responding, circa July 1969, to the question, "Why did you make this film?", posed by a film critic for Reader's Digest; as quoted in "Looking Sideways: Photographic Violence Won't Stop Violence" https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=78219633 by Whitney Bolton, Fort-Myers News-Press (July 23, 1969), p. 4

Charlie Munger photo
Youn Yuh-jung photo

“If somebody did something bad to me or was rude to me, I will never forget. But if somebody's nice to me, I will also never forget. This means people think I'm a very dangerous woman who never forgets.”

Youn Yuh-jung (1947) South Korean actress

Lauren, Ro, Living Like a Legend with Minari’s Yuh-Jung Youn, A24 Films, 2021-04-13, 2021-06-08 https://a24films.com/notes/2021/04/how-to-live-well-according-to-yuh-jung-youn-1,

“I think that as long as somebody feels passion and there’s passion behind the words, it doesn’t really matter how loud or soft they are, they’ll reach you.”

Alisen Down (1976) Canadian actress

Source: 12 Monkeys: Alisen Down On Why We Love Olivia https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/12-monkeys-alisen-down-on-why-we-love-olivia/ (July 6, 2018)

Lynn Shelton photo

“I want my movies to feel like you’re paratrooping into somebody’s life.”

Lynn Shelton (1965–2020) American film director, screenwriter, film editor, actress and film producer (1965-2020)

Slant Magazine - Interview: Lynn Shelton on Honing Her Process for Sword of Trust - 15 July 2019 https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/interview-lynn-shelton-on-honing-her-process-for-sword-of-trust/ - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210727184756/https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/interview-lynn-shelton-on-honing-her-process-for-sword-of-trust/

Cary Grant photo
Joe Armstrong photo
Joe Armstrong photo

“If somebody puts a big list of things up, my question is always: what is the most important thing on that list.”

Joe Armstrong (1950–2019) British computer scientist

The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science

Matt Ridley photo
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo

“We are in a state of bloodless civil war. No common principles, no respect for common institutions or traditions unite the various groups of politicians, who are struggling for power. To loot somebody or something is the common object under a thick varnish of pious phrases.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Letter to W. H. Smith (5 February 1889), quoted in Michael Bentley, Lord Salisbury's World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (2001), p. 65
1880s

Greg McKeown (author) photo

“Every time we check email, we're checking somebody else's agenda.”

Popular Quotes, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Twitter

Mark Wahlberg photo

“It's weird; I've been to prison, I've seen the worst sort of violence and negative shit in the streets, but when it comes to putting my heart on the line and letting somebody get to know me in a relationship, it's very difficult.”

Mark Wahlberg (1971) American actor, television producer and rap musician

Source: Chris Heath, The making of Mark, The Observer, Sunday 27 February 2000 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/feb/27/1

Bobby Heenan photo

“Nothing. Know what you do, you find out somebody that has stamps, make friends with them, then when they aren't looking, steal them and sell them. Great fun.”

Bobby Heenan (1944–2017) American professional wrestler, professional wrestling commentator and manager

Source: World Wrestling Federation (1984-1993)

Charles Stross photo

“I’ve never been so frightened for somebody in my life: I felt totally powerless. You can’t punch extradimensional parasites out of your boyfriend’s brain.”

Source: The Laundry Files, The Labyrinth Index (2018), Chapter 6, “Leviathan’s Representative” (p. 193)

Madeline Carroll photo

“Whenever I watch movies, it doesn’t matter what it is, I try to I imagine somebody else doing the character.”

Madeline Carroll (1996) American actress

Source: Kevin Costner and Madeline Carroll Interview – SWING VOTE https://collider.com/kevin-costner-and-madeline-carroll-interview-swing-vote/ (July 29, 2008)

Ben Aaronovitch photo

“First law of gossip—there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it.”

Source: Moon Over Soho (2011), Chapter 11, “Those Foolish Things” (p. 239)

David Beasley photo
Dolly Parton photo
Julian Assange photo
Marta Kristen photo

“It’s really thrilling to teach somebody all the different things I’ve learned in the past and that I can cull from my own experiences. I’m fortunate to be able to do what I wanted to do most of my life.”

Marta Kristen (1945) Norwegian actress

Source: Marta Kristen and Mark Goddard – Fifty Years Later and Still Lost in Space https://www.popentertainmentarchives.com/post/marta-kristen-and-mark-goddard-fifty-years-later-and-still-lost-in-space (January 15, 2015)

Jerry Garcia photo

“Somebody Has To Do Something. . . It Seems Pathetic That It Has To Be Us.”

Jerry Garcia (1942–1995) American musician and member of the Grateful Dead

Source: Used in various version starting in September 28, 1988, while advocating for the preservation of the world’s rain forests. "Somebody Has To Do Something. . . It Seems Pathetic That It Has To Be Us" (Quote Investigator). https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q105474079

Anthony Fauci photo

“It’s almost like passing a baton in a race. You don’t want to stop, and then give it to somebody, you want to just essentially keep going”

Anthony Fauci (1940) American immunologist and head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Fauci says Trump administration should work with Biden transition team on coronavirus response https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/15/dr-fauci-trump-should-work-with-biden-transition-team-on-coronavirus.html" (November 15 2020) on CNN’s Jake Tapper State of the Union
2020

Gilbert O'Sullivan photo

“Somebody told me once money does not grow on trees.
Well, if that's true, then how do you explain
apples oranges and lemons,
not forgetting melons?”

Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter

"The Golden Rule" (song)
Gilbert O'Sullivan, "The Golden Rule" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u70QuKjUm64 (song on YouTube)
Song lyrics

Karl Popper photo

“Besides, we should never attempt to balance anybody's misery against somebody else's happiness.”

Source: Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963), pp. 486-487

“The sound of a code being broken is usually the same as that of somebody snapping his fingers.”

Source: The Jagged Orbit (1969), Chapter 45 (p. 135; chapter title)

Margaret Cho photo