Quotes about talking
page 38

“Of course, we are against Taiwan's independence, but we don't think right now is the time to talk about reunification (with Mainland China).”

Wu Den-yih (1948) Taiwanese politician

Wu Den-yih (2018) cited in: " Taiwan opposition ditches pro-China overtures ahead of poll https://www.ft.com/content/515fc4f0-51bd-11e8-b24e-cad6aa67e23e" in Financial Times, 8 May 2018.

Thinking, Time

“I am not a fan of John McCain because he has done so little for our Veterans and he should know better than anybody what the Veterans need, especially in regards to the VA. He is yet another all talk, no action politician who spends too much time on television and not enough time doing his job and helping the Vets. He is also allowing our military to decrease substantially in size and strength, something which should never be allowed to happen. Furthermore, he was extremely disrespectful to the thousands upon thousands of people, many of whom happen to be his constituents, that came to listen to me speak about illegal immigration in Phoenix last week by calling them "crazies". These were not "crazies"—these were great American citizens. I have great respect for all those who serve in our military including those that weren't captured and are also heroes. I want to strengthen our military and take care of our Veterans. I want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN especially for those that serve to protect our freedom. I am fighting for our Veterans!”

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

2010s, 2015

People, Freedom, Time, Help

“We have to give the American people a referendum. We will win this referendum if we have it now. If we wait and delay five or six years we will lose this referendum. The public is way ahead of the political class. They get that things are broken. They get that we're spending their kids' inheritance and mortgaging their future. They are ready to be talked to like adults and not like children. So when they see the demagoguery that is directed toward people or ideas that are sincere and are real, it doesn't work anymore. The Democrats are going to come at us with their old playbook. They're going to tap into the emotions of fear, anger, and envy. But that's not aspirational. That's not hope and change, and I don't think it's going to work anymore.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

Source: Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (2010), p. 15

Children, People, Fear, Hope

“When we talk of parental influence we do not think of terror in connection with it—that is not the primary idea—it is not terror and coercion, but kindness and affection, which may bias the child's mind, and induce the child to do that which may be highly imprudent, and which, if the child were properly protected, he would never do.”

William Wood, 1st Baron Hatherley (1801–1881) Lord Chancellor of Great Britain

Turner v. Collins (1871), L. R. 7 Ch. Ap. Ca. 340.

Idea, Thinking, Parent

“People who speak Belarusian can not do anything except talk on it, because it is impossible to express anything great in Belarusian. The Belarusian language is a poor language. There are only two great languages in the world. Russian and English.”

Alexander Lukashenko (1954) President of Belarus since 20 July 1994

As quoted in Топ-10 самых скандальных и оскорбительных высказываний Лукашенко http://europeanbelarus.org/be/news/2012/2/24/3941/ // Civil campaign European Belarus, europeanbelarus.org (in Russian)

People, World

“Well, I'll tell you a story but you won't listen
It's about a nightmare steeped in tradition
It's the story of a coked-up pansy
Who spends his nights in flights of fancy

Met two fellas over gin and mixers
They talked for a while, he soon got the picture
One was a souped up Soho mincer
And the other was a pikey with a knowledge of scripture”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"La Belle et la Bete"
Lyrics and poetry

Knowledge, Night

“I'm frightened by your behaviour. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and i said good morning, what do you feel like doing today, and you said well i sort of have to do this thing, and i said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father's will, and I said what are you talking about and then you told me that your dad had died. THIS MORNING.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Immediately

Feeling, Reading

“We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Letter to Hugh Walpole (21 August 1913).

Love, Youth, Age, Beauty

“As a public teacher of mere striplings, I am often amazed by the facility and absence of resistance with which the principles of the infinitesimal calculus are accepted and assimilated by the present race of learners. When I was young, a boy of sixteen or seventeen who knew his infinitesimal calculus would have been almost pointed at in the streets as a prodigy, like Dante, as a man who had seen hell. Now-a-days, our Woolwich cadets at the same age, talk with glee of tangents and asymptotes and points of contrary flexure and discuss questions of double maxima and minima, or ballistic pendulums, or motion in a resisting medium, under the familiar and ignoble name of sums.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

J. J. Sylvester. "Additional Notes to Prof. Sylvester's Exeter British Association Address", Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), pp. 717–718 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.aas8085.0002.001;view=1up;seq=732

Age, Boy, Hell, Question

“When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise.”

John Jay Chapman (1862–1933) American author

Society http://books.google.com/books?id=O0hAAAAAYAAJ&q=%22When+a+man+talks+with+absolute+sincerity+and+freedom+he+goes+on+a+voyage+of+discovery+The+whole+company+has+shares+in+the+enterprise%22&pg=PA64#v=onepage, Causes and Consequences (1898)

Freedom, Sincerity

“It may be supposed that I led a miserable life but I did not I was very far indeed from being miserable at this time when my wife came home at night, we had always something to talk about, we were pleased to see each other, our reliance on each other was great indeed, we were poor, but we were young, active cheerful and although my wife at times doubted that we would get on in the world, I had no such misgivings.”

Francis Place (1771–1854) English social reformer

Source: The Autobiography of Francis Place: 1771-1854, 1972, p. 7; Cited in: Jeremy Wickins. " An Overview of Francis Place's Life, 1771-1854 http://www.historyhome.co.uk/people/place2.htm," historyhome.co.uk, last edited 12 january 2016.

Life, World, Home, Time

“Koch was one of the sincere Socialists in the movement. He was a follower of Gregor Strasser, like most of the North German bosses. ‘Of course the world will become socialistic,’ he said to me once when I went to see him at Konigsberg. ‘Capitalism has done for itself. Do you suppose that Hitler can stop at this reactionary beginning? My dear man, many things have to happen yet. Your Junker cousins, we shall kill the lot of them,’ he added, laughing. ‘We shall sweep them all away. Peasants must take over; we are settling them on the land. The things the slack Sozis (Socialists) never carried out, we shall put through. Away with the Junkers and the captains of industry! Do you suppose we were just talking through our hats about nationalizing the banks and abolishing the stock exchange and all that?… And if that whimpering instrument Hitler doesn't squeak out our tune, we shall get another fiddle to play on.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 89

World, Sincerity

“Were Kim Jong Il to abandon his ideology of paranoid, race-based nationalism and normalize relations with Washington, his personality cult would lose all justification, while his impoverished country would lose all reason to exist as a separate Korean state. The problem for U. S. negotiators is therefore not one of sticks versus carrots; the regime in Pyongyang will neither be bullied nor sweet-talked into committing political suicide.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, North Korea's Race Problem (February 2010)

Problem, Suicide, Personality, Country

“You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8 d. to 6 d. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

17 March 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Country

“THE COURT:… Mr. Dellinger, do you care to say anything? Only in respect to punishment.
MR. DELLINGER: Yes… and I hope you will do me the courtesy not to interrupt me while I am talking.
THE COURT: I won't interrupt you as long as you are respectful.
MR. DELLINGER: Well. I will talk about the facts and the facts don't always encourage false respect.”

Dave Dellinger (1915–2004) American activist

United States of America vs. David T. Dellinger et al.

Hope, Falseness

“A divorced man talked about his experiences with women:Everybody is looking for a winner. They're impressed by position and status even if they're not being treated well. They evaluate a man by such things as his dress and his home.If you start saying you want freedom and space, they can't handle it. You can just tell that they wouldn't be there if you didn't have money. … It's really easy to get laid. Just go to a nice place dressed nice—everyone's looking for a well-off guy.Society preaches that you must be this or you must be that. Success has nothing to do with human qualities. I found that it was empty. I couldn't feel a damn thing emotionally. I was numb. Everything was in order, but nothing—no tears, no real happiness, no real sadness either. When you can't find anything to be sad about, that's really sad! I'm getting so I don't want to do anything. I'm emotionally upset by humanity. Not that I'm an angel, but it's discouraging to see that there's only one place you can go. Everyday I almost feel like vomiting.I've always had people crash on me, but I've never been able to crash on them. It scares the hell out of me. There's no one who cares enough. The only reason I'm here is to keep the whole damn thing up. I wonder why I can't sink. It's scary.</blockquote”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Liberation Crunch: Getting the Worst of Both Worlds, pp. 146–147
The New Male (1979)

Money, Happiness, People, Sadness

“Hold on. I realize — can, just, just — I realize something's happening in Ferguson, but we're talking about something important here, so can you at least split-screen the video? I realize — look, the protesters and the police are clashing again, alright? They’re clashing again. But we're talking about the dead— the death of an American”

Megyn Kelly (1970) American reporter

of an American who was beheaded, and Pete deserves his say.
After footage of Ferguson, Missouri police chasing protesters over the shooting of Michael Brown was aired while contributor Pete Hegseth spoke to her about ISIS beheading journalist James Foley.
2014-08-19
The Kelly File
Fox News, quoted in * 2014-08-21
Megyn Kelly Scolds Producers for Interrupting ISIS Discussion with Ferguson Video
Andrew Kirell
Media Matters for America
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/megyn-kelly-scolds-producers-for-interrupting-isis-discussion-with-ferguson-video/
2014-08-27

Death, Dead

“I really want to talk to you a lot, but what do I have to do? I still have things in progress here, two paintings and [I] must necessarily study sheep. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, in het Nederlands:) Ik verlang erg om veel met je te bepraten maar wat moet ik doen Ik heb nog dingen hier onderhanden, twee schilderijtjes en moet noodzakelijk nog schapen bestuderen. Quote of Mauve, in his letter from ; as cited in Archive P.A. Scheen, collectie RKD Den Haag http://delamar.bntours.nl/!mad1832-bronnen.html Anton Mauve studied the sheep on the spot itself, to paint them in the proper mood and in good lighting on the canvas 1860's

Study, Painting

“I watched a rerun on television of a 1960s comedy programme called "Mr Ed", which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

Horse

“Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

"Circumfession." In Jacques Derrida, eds. G. Bennington & J. Derrida, trans. G. Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 70

“On the second day, they started inviting their equally rowdy friends into my apartment, and we exchanged more small talk. To my indignant surprise, they asked me the question I always dreaded answering: “Are you a virgin?” I admitted that I was a virgin. I always admitted the truth about this. It was my life struggle, and I couldn’t lie about such a thing.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Inceldom

Life, Truth, Lie, Question

“Dad joined the US Army by this point [1964], and initially he was stationed in Texas and then South Carolina. But the Vietnam war brought our normal life to an end. Once again, Dad was gone. Communications were very basic back then: Dad couldn't just pick up a cellphone and let us know he was okay. Months would go by without a letter or anything. Eventually he bought two tape recorders -- one he kept with him and one for our house. Dad used to talk into the recorder and send the tapes home. Then we would gather round our machine and tell Dad stories. And I would sing. I still have all the tapes, but I can't listen to them. It hurts too much. After Dad came back from Nam, he wasn't well. He'd been poisoned by Agent Orange and needed quite a lot of looking after. Mum was busy trying to get her Cuban qualifications revalidated by a US university, so I had to take care of Dad and my little sister [Becky]. It was tough. Toward the end, Dad was too far gone and he didn't really know what was hapening around him. I joined Miami Sound Machine in 1975 and we were getting quite successful, but Dad didn't even know who I was. He had to be moved to the hospital. On my wedding day in 1978 [September 2] I went to visit him, still wearing my wedding dress. That was the last time that he said my name. Dad died in 1980, but he touches my life every day. On my last album [Unwrapped] I did a lot of writing while I was looking at a picture of him in his younger days -- so happy and in the prime of his life. I'm not sure if he sees me, but I can feel him all around me. I hope he knows that I am so very proud of him.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

The [London] Sunday Times (November 17, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life, War, Happiness, Hope

“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word "faggot", so I — so kind of an impasse — can't really talk about Edwards.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Washington, DC (2 March 2007), as quoted in "Coulter's Slur Against Edwards Stirs Outrage" at WNBC (4 March 2007) http://www.wnbc.com/politics/11168421/detail.html?rss=ny&psp=news. 2007

“When I was nominated for the position of Vice President I was very unenthusiastic about it. But I took the post because it provided a powerful platform to talk on matters that are important for the country.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Closing address to the National Youth Peace camp at Debua, 9 December 2005.

Country

“Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can't deal with them… But it's a complicated matter: Science studies what's at the edge of understanding, and what's at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated. In fact even understanding insects is an extremely complicated problem in the sciences. So the actual sciences tell us virtually nothing about human affairs.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Science in the Dock, Discussion with Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Krauss & Sean M. Carroll (2011), 2, Chomsky.info, March 1, 2006, August 16, 2011 http://www.chomsky.info/debates/20060301.htm, Quotes 2010s, 2011

Way, Understanding, Question, Problem

“Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Men of Genius Deficient in Conversation.
Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834)

“"Jezebel!" (when talking about a female heel (villain) wrestler)”

Jim Ross (1952) American professional wrestling commentator, professional wrestling referee, and restaurateur

Commentary Nicknames

“Susan [Silver] gives me a huge amount of room to be that recluse, and also the incentive to not be. It’s worth a lot to see her be excited about being around someone who’s not afraid of his shadow. It’s good for her. She digs it. But we’re becoming more alike. When she comes home to me from a day at the office, where she’s talking to people from all over the world about all sorts of important things… well, I probably haven’t answered the phone in seventy-two hours. She knows that when she comes home she’s going to get privacy, because I’m not like ‘These are my South American friends and… honey, have you ever really listened to that first Van Halen album?’ She’s the best roommate I’ve ever had. People are sort of perplexed, as to how this could possibly work in this grunge-music, super-druggy era where everybody is so emotionally screwed up. Not only is Soundgarden not OD’ing on heroin, but the singer’s wife manages the band, there’s no weird Yoko Ono trip, and she’s not trying to make us dress up like lions and unicorns.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

When asked if intimacy is an issue in his marriage to Soundgarden's manager Susan Silver ** Interview with Details Magazine, December 1996 https://pitchfork.com/features/article/10081-chris-cornell-searching-for-solitude/, Soundgarden Era

People, World, Music, Home

“My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Source: The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), p. 54.

“Tea heads are not like junkies. A junky hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don't do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars' worth of weed. If you come right to the point, they say you are a "bring down."”

William S. Burroughs book Junkie

In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler.
Junkie (1953)

Money, Way, Light, Tea

“There's nothing like sitting back and talking to your cows.”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

On missing his Australian ranch, US Weekly, (Issue 304)

“Learning science means learning to talk science… Talking science means observing, describing, comparing, classifying, analysing, discussing, hypothesizing, theorizing, questioning, challenging, arguing, designing experiments, following procedures, judging, evaluating, deciding, concluding, generalizing, reporting … in and through the language of science.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 1; as cited in: Bernard Laplante, "Teaching science to language minority students in elementary classrooms." NYSABE Journal 12 (1997): 62-83.

Question, Learning, Science

“I will not talk of non-intervention, for it is not an English word.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

When an MP sought to correct Palmerston when he said "non-interference" instead of "non-intervention" in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1832/aug/02/germany-protocol-of-the-diet (2 August 1832) 1830s

“When it comes to the Middle East, Trump again has the advantage of being an unknown quantity. Although he has talked a lot of nonsense about foreign policy, he has also insisted on a valid point: the current US policy simply doesn’t work. That, in turn, might persuade him to look for something different, creating at least an opportunity for repairing some of the damage done by Obama’s wayward policies to peace and stability in the Middle East. Clinton, in contrast, already has a record. She backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt before Obama decided to ditch them. She was co-pilot in Obama’s disastrous policy in Libya. On the perennial Arab-Israeli conflict, she did the hoola dance choreographed by Obama, going round and round and getting nowhere. Clinton was also in the driving seat when the US launched secret talks in Oman with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a textbook example of diplomatic chicanery that led to the great swindle known as “the Iran Nuclear deal.””

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Clinton or Trump – Better or Less Bad? http://english.aawsat.com/2016/11/article55361471/opinion-clinton-trump-better-less-bad, Ashraq Al-Awsat (November 4, 2016)

Secret, Peace, Dance

“Here you will find a pleasant and agreeable style, of a natural simplicity. The narrative is pure and the good faith of the author shines from it, exempt from the vanity of talking about oneself, and from partiality or envy when speaking of others. His ideas and exhortations are accompanied more by good zeal and truth than by any fine ability; and all throughout there is an authoritative tone and gravity proper to a man of good background, brought up in great affairs.”

Philippe de Commines (1447–1511) writer and diplomat

Vous y trouverez le langage doux et aggreable, d'une naïfve simplicité, la narration pure, et en laquelle la bonne foy de l'autheur reluit evidemment, exempte de vanité parlant de soy, et d'affection et d'envie parlant d'autruy : ses discours et enhortemens, accompaignez, plus de bon zele et de verité, que d'aucune exquise suffisance, et tout par tout de l'authorité et gravité, representant son homme de bon lieu, et élevé aux grans affaires.
Michel de Montaigne Essais Bk. II, ch. 10: "Des Livres"; translation from Serge Hughes (trans.) The Essential Montaigne (New York: New American Library, 1970) p. 293.
Criticism

Truth, Faith, Idea, Nature

“At this point, I wouldn't want to jinx it by meeting him. His arrangements are incredible. I just send him a tape, we talk on the phone, and he sends me the finished orchestra tracks. Hear that? I'm gonna get that chord on the radio!”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Discussing his then nearly decade-and-a-half-long working relationship with arranger Clare Fischer (whom he'd never met, nor ever would meet, face to face), as quoted in the January 2000 issue of Keyboard Magazine, reprinted in Keyboard Presents Synth Gods https://books.google.com/books?id=BMucfBTXvMgC&pg=PA97&dq=%22I+wouldn't+want+to+jinx+it%22+%22that+chord+on+the+radio%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=w2acVdevKIKYyASn3oCoBg&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (2011), edited by Ernie Rideout, p. 97

“This in short is the case of the progressives who talk about freedom of thought. For them freedom of thought is synonymous to freedom of disowning one's God. This is, however, not freedom of thought but freedom of atheism.”

Muhammad Qutb (1919–2014) Egyptian Islamist writer and scholar

Source: Islam: the Misunderstood Religion, Chapter 12, p. 214.

God, Freedom

“What ends up happening with musicians and actors is, they're famous, so when somebody has an issue, it's something that gets talked about. People die of drug overdoses every day that nobody talks about. It's a shame that famous people get all the focus, because it then gets glorified a little bit, like, 'This person was too sensitive for the world,' and, 'A light twice as bright lives half as long,' and all that. Which is all bullshit. It's not true.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Chris Cornell talks about his latest reinvention, living in Florida, Tampa Bay Times, 9 June 2016 http://www.tampabay.com/things-to-do/music/rocker-is-in-tune-with-florida-life/2280927, Soundgarden Era

People, World, Light, Personality

“If you look at what's going on in terms of unity, the Bernie people are angry. They're angry. He was angry. What was amazing to me is when she was talking about Bernie last night, the camera was on him and he was angry. It almost looks like he has buyer's remorse, like he shouldn't have made the deal.”

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

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

People, Night

“As soon as I saw [Barrett], we both hugged and talked and forgave each other. I think we became truer friends, better than we were before the fight.”

Carlos Zambrano (1981) Venezuelan baseball pitcher

Huang, Michael,"Anger Management",Chicago Cubs Vineline, Volume 22, Issue 7, page 14
2007

Thinking, Fight

“It’s astonishing to me how many places in America, not way, way far away from cities, but in cities and near cities that don’t have access to broadband. And that disadvantages kids who are asked to do homework using the internet. 5 million of them live in homes without access to the internet. So you talk about an achievement gap, it starts right there.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Warren, Michigan (August 11, 2016)

Way, Home

“The cultural clock runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter. No matter to what hazardous lengths we let out our line they still withdraw again, and further, into the depths. … however, runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter recovered from refuse heaps and graveyards, from abandoned cities and buried villages. Only the arts of material nature have survived; of music and dance, of talk and ritual, of all the arts of temporal expression practically nothing is known elsewhere than in the Mediterranean world, save through traditional survivals among remote groups.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

Source: The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 14.

World, Art, Music, Nature

“I'd say to myself or whoever I was with, 'It'll look good in the biography.' and then I'd go ahead and do whatever daft thing it was - like taking acid on the sacred mesa or doing the bungee-jump, getting the haircut, dancing with the stranger, talking to the crowd - whatever I was 'scared' of mostly, or fancied doing, or never dared before, I'd try it on the basis that it would make for a more interesting read one day.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2004
http://www.popimage.com/content/grant2004.html
On life

Reading, Dance

“Rodriguez: When my mother read Hunger of Memory, she was horrified by it and she asked me, as an accusation, "Why did you hold these things in all of your years against me, why didn't you tell me? If I offended you by talking about how dark you were in the summer why didn't you tell me that? And tell me to stop? Why do you hold that for another 25 years and then spill it all out?"”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Good question, Mama. Good question.
Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

Hunger, Question, Memory, Reading

“Talk about your life
I'd like to know
It's not easy going
Where no-one goes
And no-one knows…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Discovery (1984)

Life

“Ha ha! We are just poking a little friendly fun at Germany, which is famous for enjoying a good joke, or as the Germans say, "Sprechnehaltenzoltenfussenmachschnitzerkalbenrollen." Here is just one hilarious example of what we are talking about:
First German: How many Polish people does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Second German: I don't know! How many?
First German: Let's invade Poland and find out!
Millions of Other Germans: Okay!”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (1991)

People, Light

“They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there.
"Drunk," the cop said.
The other one turned me around into the light. "He don't smell bad. That cut on his head didn't come from a fall either."
"Mugged?"
"Maybe."
I didn't give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now.
Now was a time when I wasn't anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when it's torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom.”

Mickey Spillane book The Girl Hunters

The Girl Hunters (1962)

Cars, Jerk, Way, Feeling

“I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

Hunted Down http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/hntdn10.txt (1859)

Men, Idea

“Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. …Joni will talk compellingly and passionately about alternate tunings for hours, comparing them to different colors that van Gogh used in his paintings.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Color, Way, Passion, Painting

“"We know who the chicken hawks are. They talk tough on national defense and military issues and cast aspersions on others," he said. "When it was their turn to serve where were they? AWOL, that's where they were…the lead chickenhawk against Sen. Kerry [is] the vice president of the United States, Vice President Cheney.”

Frank Lautenberg (1924–2013) U.S. Senator from New Jersey

On the floor of the Senate, April 28, 2004 http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/28/lautenberg.kerry/

“It is almost as hard for friends to meet
As for the morning and evening stars.
Tonight then is a rare event,
Joining, in the candlelight,
Two men who were young not long ago
But now are turning grey at the temples.
To find that half our friends are dead
Shocks us, burns our hearts with grief.
We little guessed it would be twenty years
Before I could visit you again.
When I went away, you were still unmarried;
But now these boys and girls in a row
Are very kind to their father's old friend.
They ask me where I have been on my journey;
And then, when we have talked awhile,
They bring and show me wines and dishes,
Spring chives cut in the night-rain
And brown rice cooked freshly a special way.
My host proclaims it a festival,
He urges me to drink ten cups—
But what ten cups could make me as drunk
As I always am with your love in my heart?
Tomorrow the mountains will separate us;
After tomorrow—who can say?”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"To My Retired Friend Wei" (Chinese: 贈衛八處士) in: University of Virginia's 300 Tang Poems http://etext.virginia.edu/chinese/frame.htm at etext.virginia.edu

Love, Men, Way, Girl

“Experience is the consequence of activity. The manager literally wades into the swarm of "events" that surround him and actively tries to unrandomize them and impose some order: The manager acts physically in the environment, attends to some of it, ignores most of it, talks to other people about what they see and are doing.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1970s, Social Psychology of Organizing, (1979), p. 148

People

“Scott London: How did you begin to explore the connection between management and science?
Meg Wheatley: I didn't have an interest in the new science. I had a realization that in my profession — which was vaguely labeled "organizational change," "organizational development," or "management consulting" in general — none of us knew how organizations change. When I talked to other consultants, I noticed that if we had an organizational change effort that was successful, it felt like a miracle to us.
I realized with a great start one day that we weren't even geared up for success. It didn't matter that we didn't know how to change organizations. We were all professionals who didn't hope to achieve what we were selling or suggesting to clients. The field was really moribund.
At the same time — and this is the serendipity of life — I had a friend and educator whom I had worked with for many years who said casually one day "Meg, if you're interested in systems thinking, you should be reading quantum physics." He didn't know where I was in my despair over my professional failings. But I said, "Okay, give me a book list."”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

He gave me ten titles. I read eight of those and I was off. I always credit him with that casual, helpful comment that changed my life. Scott London (2008) " The New Science of Leadership: An Interview with Margaret Wheatley http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/wheatley.html" in Quantum21. management journal, Spring 2008.

Life, Books, Education, Hope

“Judy lived in my hotel. She was just seventeen, and what she was doing in Paris was supposedly chaperoning her younger brother, a fully fledged concert pianist of fifteen, who was studying there with one of the leading teachers. In view of their combined and startling innocence, however, this was a rather useless arrangement. Their last name was Galache, and they were the issue with which the highly unlikely union of a Quaker woman from Philadelphia and a dreadfully dashing Spaniard (now, alas, dead) had been blessed. Naturally their upbringing, up to this point, had been strict and very sheltered. … Judy was so different from me that it was really ludicrous. Whereas I was hell-bent for living, she was content, at least for the time being, to leave all that to others. Just as long as she could hear all about it. She really was funny about this. Folded every which way on the floor, looking like Bambi — all eyes and legs and no chin — she would listen for ages and ages with rapt attention to absolutely any drivel that you happened to be talking. It was unbelievable.”

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) American journalist, actress

Part One, Two
The Dud Avocado (1958)

Age, Way, Hell, Nature

“The rules were always there. There was always one rule; don't break the golden rule, which is if someone says that they love your music, so they love you and you're amazing; you're not amazing. You're not amazing. It's not you, they don't know you, you know? It's not that way. So don't believe that. I don't believe that about myself, and I don't believe when someone likes me too much or hates me too much. I don't believe they know what they're talking about.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

" JOSHUA HOMME: “IT DOESN'T MATTER IF IT’S BEEN SAID, IT’S NEVER BEEN SAID BY ME” http://www.antiquiet.com/news/2010/09/josh-homme-interview-zane-lowe/", Antiquet (August 27th, 2009)

Love, Hate, Music, Way

“My fifth principle is…to acknowledge the equal rights of all nations. You may sympathize with one nation more than another. Nay, you must sympathize in certain circumstances with one nation more than another. You sympathize most with those nations, as a rule, with which you have the closest connection in language, in blood, and in religion, or whose circumstances at the time seem to give the strongest claim to sympathy. But in point of right all are equal, and you have no right to set up a system under which one of them is to be placed under moral suspicion or espionage, or to be made the constant subject of invective. If you do that, but especially if you claim for yourself a superiority, a pharisaical superiority over the whole of them, then I say you may talk about your patriotism if you please, but you are a misjudging friend of your country, and in undermining the basis of the esteem and respect of other people for your country you are in reality inflicting the severest injury upon it.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in West Calder, Scotland (27 November 1879), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879 (Leicester University Press, 1971), pp. 116-117.
1870s

People, Religion, Reality, Time

“Revision is a dangerous word. Revision should never appear, I venture to think, in the mouth of a statesman or in the policy of a Government until they are prepared to define very closely the limits within which they think revision should take place. The long history of this country has in one sense been a history of the revision of Treaties. We have revised and revised and what have we got for it? What concession once made has any longer kept the value it had before it was revised? Of which of these concessions can it be said at this present moment that it has tempered feeling in Germany, that it has produced that friendly spirit that those who made it desired to promote? What is passing in Germany seems to me to render this a singularly inopportune moment to talk about the revision of Treaties.”

Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1933/apr/13/adjournment-easter-1 in the House of Commons (13 April 1933) questioning revisions of the Treaty of Versailles 1930s

Feeling, History, Thinking, Sense

“… our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

God, Intelligence

“Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral] Marshall about it. He'd no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed. When the country went backward — and Republican in the election of 1946, this incident loomed large on the DP [Displaced Person] program. The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes. Look at the Congress[ional] attitude on DP — and they all come from DPs.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Personal diary 6:00 P. M. Monday (21 July 1947) https://www.trumanlibrary.org/diary/page21.htm

World, Dogs, Business, Sense

“We won the tie in Barcelona but everyone talks about Barcelona winning and says we parked the bus in front of the goal. We didn't park the bus, we parked the plane and we did it for two reasons. One, because we only had 10 men and two, because we beat them 3-1 at San Siro, not by parking the bus, or the boat or the airplane but by smashing them.”

José Mourinho (1963) Portuguese association football player and manager

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2010/may/22/champions-league-final-jose-mourinho 2010

Men

“So seeing that there is nothing further to say, I shall go right on talking about The Circle, thus proving that I am a born reviewer of plays. p. 256”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 5: 1922

“I dislike talk of the Gods, who taunt us with their promises, and whose disappointments we must always accept.”

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

Ch 3
The Rahotep series, Book 3: Egypt: The Book of Chaos (2011)

God, Disappointment

“Turner did not talk well, and never talked of his own art, or of the art of others.”

Charles Robert Leslie (1794–1859) British painter (1794-1859)

Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie with Selections from his correspondence

Art

“Don't write when you can talk; don't talk when you can nod your head.”

Martin Lomasney (1859–1933) American politician

Van Nostrand, Albert D. (December 1948). "The Lomasney Legend". The New England Quarterly. 21 (4): 437. JSTOR 361565 https://www.jstor.org/stable/361565

“Thoughtfully, just as Jabscreen owners everywhere were running out of apps to compare – and, by extension, anything to talk about – the nice droids at Apple Castle gifted them a whole new branch of conversation: the launch of the Jabscreen 4, which apparently is miles better than a regular Jabscreen, although no one can really explain why. Its most impressive feature is this: simply by existing, it suddenly makes your existing Olde Worlde vanilla Jabscreen seem rubbish. How can you enjoy sliding the little icons around on your Jabscreen 3 when you know that if you had a Jabscreen 4, those very same icons would be slightly sharper? The answer is you can't.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Guardian columns

World

“For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end,…Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

Men, History, Reality, Time

“The bourgeois, even the Nationalist Press, began to take fright and talk of Bolshevism and Hitler himself boasted: ‘In our movement the two extremes come together: the Communists from the Left and the officers and students from the Right. These two have always been the most active elements, and it was the greatest crime that they used to oppose each other in street fights.’… Our party has already succeeded in uniting these two utter extremes within the ranks of our storm troops. They will form the core of the great German liberation movement, in which all without distinction will stand together when the day comes to say: The Nation arises, the storm is breaking!”

Konrad Heiden (1901–1966) German journalist and historian

Source: Der Fuehrer, Hitler’s Rise to Power (1944), p. 122

Fight

“Yeah, congratulations. Way to go, Punk, way to go. Congratulations on your big win. You need to enjoy them while you can. You see, you can smirk if you want to, but I see straight through you. When I look at you, I see a fraud. And I'm not talking about the fact that you call yourself the best in the world, I'm talking about you as a person. Because I did a little research this week, Punk, and I found something, a little deep, dirty, dark secret about you. You've been straight edge ever since you came to the WWE, but you've never explained the reasons why. I wanna tell all of these wannabes why you're straight edge. I wanna tell them that you're straight edge because your father is an alcoholic.
Yeah, that's right. Your father was an alcoholic who let you down every step of the way when you were growing up, and it terrifies you. You don't want to end up like him. But it's inevitable that you will, because alcohol is in your blood, it's in your genes, it's part of who you are, and that tortures you. I know you've built this facade, this wall that you're a sarcastic antihero with not a care in the world, but I think I've found something that you care about. I've found something that gives you nightmares, something that terrifies you.
And isn't it ironic that the very alcohol that you crave is the same thing that ruined your childhood? Oh, the nightmares you must have about your father; I almost feel bad for you, Punk. Is that the reason why you have all those tattoos? Was the pain of wanting to drink so bad that you needed the pain of a tattoo needle to take it out of your mind? Was that your only solace?
It doesn't matter if it is, Punk, because you are going to drink eventually, and I'm the one who is going to make you drink. At WrestleMania XXVIII, I'm going to take away your title, I'm gonna take away your claims of being the best in the world, I'm gonna take away your bravado, and I'm gonna leave you a broken man. You're gonna hit bottom, Punk, and when you do, you're going to embrace your destiny, and you're gonna take a drink. And it's gonna taste so good that you're gonna wanna take another one, and another one, and another one. After April 1st, I'm gonna be recognized for who I am—the undisputed best in the world and the new WWE Champion. And you're gonna be recognized for who you are, who your father was—a pathetic damn drunk!”

Chris Jericho (1970) American professional wrestler, musician, television host, podcast host and author

March 12, 2012 - WWE Raw

Pain, Alcohol, Secret, World

“The Grand Inquisitor explains that you have to create mysteries because otherwise the common people will be able to understand things. They have to be subordinated so you have to make things look mysterious and complicated. That's the test of the intellectual. It's also good for them: then you're an important person, talking big words which nobody can understand. Sometimes it gets kind of comical, say in post-modern discourse. Especially around Paris, it has become a comic strip, I mean it's all gibberish. But it's very inflated, a lot of television cameras, a lot of posturing. They try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There's nothing there. But these are the ways in which contemporary intellectuals, including those on the Left, create great careers for themselves, power for themselves, marginalize people, intimidate people and so on.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

In Chomsky on Anarchism, 2005.
Quotes 2000s, 2005

People, Way, Understanding, Personality

““I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy. "Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.””

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5

Hope

“The act of writing the book was painful at times, but it was easier than talking to someone.”

Piper Laurie (1932) actress

About writing her memoir. Theodore P. Mahne, "Actress Piper Laurie charms audience, interviewer at Tennessee Williams Festival" (25 March 2012), Times-Picayune at nola.com (New OrleansNet) http://www.nola.com/arts/index.ssf/2012/03/actress_piper_laurie_charms_au.html

Pain, Books, Time

“"Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don't happen."
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Poetry For Supper"
Poetry For Supper (1958)

Beer

“Every man has to settle down eventually. You know why you gotta settle down eventually? Because you don't want to be the old guy in the club. You know what I'm talking about. Every club you go into, there's always some old guy. He ain't really old, just a little too old to be in the club.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Bring the Pain (HBO, 1996)

Guy

“I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

As quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book : A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 43

Thinking

“I better quit my talking now; I told you all I know,
But please remember, pardner, wherever you may go,
I'm older than your old folks, and I'm younger than the young,
And I'm about the biggest thing that man has ever done.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

The Columbia River Collection (1941), Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done

“To try to live in posterity is to be like an actor who leaps over the footlights and talks to the orchestra.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Posthumous Life, i
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIV - The Life of the World to Come

“The wiser a man is, the less talkative will he be.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

“From Adam Smith through John Maynard Keynes, economics had been mostly talk. At Harvard economics was talk. At MIT, Samuelson made it math.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Part Three, Arbitrage, Paul Samuelson, p. 117
Fortune's Formula (2005)

“I think when people talk about civil liberties, they sometimes forget that action taken to protect the citizen against physical violence and physical attack is a blow in favour and not a blow against civil liberties.”

John Howard (1939) 25th Prime Minister of Australia

Terrorism Summit (Friday, 5 August 2005)

People, Thinking, Forgetting

“Eisenhower had about the most expressive face I ever painted, I guess. Just like an actor's. Very mobile. When he talked, he used all the facial muscles. And he had a great, wide mouth that I liked. When he smiled, it was just like the sun came out.”

Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) Armatian

As quoted in A Rockwell Portrait : An Intimate Biography‎ (1978) by Donald Walton, p. 198

Smile, Sun, Painting

“The Bible was very definitely written by men, and not superior men either; far from it! This is why so much of it can be shown to be historically and scientifically dead wrong about damned-near everything back-to-front. We’re talking about people who believe snakes and donkeys can talk, who believe in incantations, blood sacrifice, ritual spells, enchanted artifacts, pyrotechnic potions, astrology, and the five elements of witchcraft. They thought that if you use a magic wand to sprinkle blood all over someone, it will cure them of leprosy. We’re talking about people who think that rabbits chew cud, and that bats are birds, and whales are fish, and that π is a round number. These folks believed that if you display striped patterns to a pregnant cow, it would bare striped calves. How could anyone say that who knows anything about genetics? Obviously the authors of this book didn’t.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFrkjEgUDZA&list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC&index=2, Youtube (November 24, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, People, Books, Bird

“We talk about issues, but I'm not his adviser, I'm his wife… I find that it's really best not to give your spouse a lot of advice. I don't want a lot of advice from him.”

Laura Bush (1946) First Lady of the United States from 2001 to 2009

CBS News (June 24, 2004)

“One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against it.

So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead."

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best -- summing it all up -- without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

from the First Annual Santa Barbara Lectures on Science and Society, University of California at Santa Barbara (1975)

Men, Way, Guy, Idea

“We'll put an asterisk next to Barry Bonds' name, sure, as soon as we put one next to Babe Ruth's name. Getting to break records before black people were allowed to play? Excuse me, where is that asterisk? Why don't people talk about that?”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Happy Thoughts (2011)

People

“[[I]t's] one thing to talk about the redistribution of wealth. It's quite another thing to talk about the redistribution of power. That's more what interests me.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Norah Vincent, Sex, Love and Politics, id., p. 41, col. 1.

Wealth

“I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting. I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things. Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself. It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Love, Life, Secret, Idea

“There are Republicans, friends of mine, that I talk to that are very concerned about what’s going on. It is not easy for a Republican to take on a president of their own party in the first thirty days. Don’t assume their silence today means they will be forever silent.
They haven’t moved to the place where I think is sufficient. But you are seeing some early signs here. I don’t want to predict that we’re all going to be kumbaya, Republicans and Democrats fighting the Trump administration on a daily basis but I think this is a very uncomfortable moment for a lot of Republicans.”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

"2,000 turn out in West Hartford for Sen. Murphy town hall meeting" http://fox61.com/2017/02/21/overflow-crowd-in-west-hartford-for-sen-murphy-town-hall-meeting/, 21 February 2017.

Thinking, Silence, Fight

“What people are desperate for, not just in Virginia but in this country, are people who will have a positive vision, who will actually speak to the issues that truly matter–the issues that are real issues in Virginia right now–like real gang violence, public safety, the issue of protecting history in Virginia with our monuments, some of the things that in our race in Virginia, like the economy and jobs, these are the things that have defined these races. Yet the Democrats won’t talk about that because they don’t have solutions, and they don’t want to.”

Jill Vogel (1970) American politician

Jill Vogel: VA Dems Focused on Division over Issues Because ‘They Don’t Have Solutions’ http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/11/06/vogel-va-dems-focused-division-issues-dont-have-solutions/ (November 6, 2017)

People, History, Country

“… most scientists are really quite happy to talk about their work. It's often hard to get them to shut up, actually.”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU, Podcast #148, May 21st, 2008 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/148 The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2000s

Happiness

“I heard one of the teaching pastors at Willow Creek speak on the rich young ruler text that Rich (Mullins) had talked about in Wheaton's chapel. The teaching pastor had said, "now this doesn't mean you have to go sell your rollerblades and golf clubs," and he went on to "contextualize" the teaching to show that we just need to be careful not to make idols of our things. I wasn't so sure about that. Jesus doesn't tell the man to be a better steward, or to treat his workers fairly, or not to make money an idol. He tells this highly educated and devoutly religious young man that he lacks one thing: giving up everything he owns to give the poor.”

Shane Claiborne The Irresistible Revolution

Source: The Irresistible Revolution (2006), p. 103

Money, Education

“We should just make it a little bit more difficult for people with known violent tendencies to be able to get a gun. And I'm not talking about the cops. No. Not talking about the cops. I'm saying, let's make it a little bit more difficult for mentally unstable people with known violent tendencies to be able to get a gun. And again, I'm not talking about the cops. If you can go on their Facebook page and see that this guy is a virulent racist, right? Make it a little more difficult for virulent racists, who are mentally unstable with known violent tendencies to be able to get-- And again, I'm not talking about the cops.”

David Cross (1964) American comedian, writer and actor

Making America Great Again

People, Guy

“I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Quoted in Archibald W. Butt (1930), Taft and Roosevelt.
Attributed

People

“Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Love, World, Making love, Painting

“This is one of the most highly secret matters there are, perhaps the most secret. Anybody who speaks about it is shot dead immediately. Two talkative people died yesterday.”

Odilo Globocnik (1904–1945) SS officer

To Kurt Gerstein, 17 August 1942. Quoted in "Genocide, Critical Issues of the Holocaust" - Page 455 - by Alex Grobman, Daniel Landes, Sybil Milton - History - 1983.

People, Secret, Dead

“Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop.”

Marcel Marceau (1923–2007) French mime and actor

US News & World Report (23 February 1987)

“Every now and again I get approached by "celebrities" [saying] "oh, you're doing a great job mate, I think it's wonderful what you're doing". Ok, and what you're gonna do? You're gonna make a freaking film now, aren't you? You're gonna make another bloody record! You're gonna stand in front of tens of thousands of people, you're gonna go on chat shows watched by millions of people! Are you gonna bring this subject up yourself? No! Why? "Me, me, me!" "I don't wanna affect my carrer!" I tell you… anyone in the public eye - come nowhere near me unless you are prepared to put your-bloody-self when your mouth is. Walk the talk or walk the other way!”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: Icke's Remember Who You Are event, 2012

People, Way, Thinking

“I was writing for businesses. I think my mother was a little skeptical in the beginning, but fortunately, as a free-lance writer I was successful almost immediately. And so she was very proud, because she measured success in terms of money, which is what I started to do as well. My goal then, became to increase the amount of money that I made each month. Not simply each year, but each month — I mean, talk about pressure — to have more billable hours each month. So that by the end of my third year of being a free-lance writer, I was billing 90 hours a week. I had no time to sleep. I had no life. People said I was crazy, that I was a workaholic. And I couldn't understand how it was that I had these wonderful clients, and I was making all this money, and I wasn't happy and I didn't feel successful. That's when I started to write fiction.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

American Acheivement interview (1996)

Life, Money, Happiness, People

“Well, we haven’t learnt yet to live together peacefully… But I don’t know what progress really means. Anyway, I think we need to have faith in the fact that there is more out there to be explained. Even the paradigms that we now have, including subjective value theory, for example, are only provisional. Some physicist might believe that ultimately, we will be able to explain everything. To me, that is utterly stupid, just like saying that an atheist is equally dogmatic as a Texas Baptist. It seems to me that, if you accept evolution, you can still not expect your dog to get up and start talking German. And that’s because your dog is not genetically programmed to do that. We are human animals, and we are equally bound. There are whole realms of discourse out there that we cannot reach, by definition. There are always going to be limits beyond which we cannot go. Knowing that they are there, you can always hope to move a little closer – but that’s all.”

James M. Buchanan (1919–2013) American economist

Source: Karen Ilse Horn (ed.) Roads to Wisdom, Conversations With Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009)

Stupidity, Faith, Dogs, Hope

“I can’t work with computers but I work with someone who can. We talk about what the subjects will be and then I get a load of images about Liverpool. We then scan them and put them on a disk and then we manipulate them on the computer. I am treating them as posters. They are prints but I want them to look like posters.”

Peter Blake (1932) British artist

Colin Serjent, "Blake's 08, http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/nerve9/peter_blake.php Nerve, Autumn 2006 On producing serigraph prints to celebrate Liverpool as the 2008 European Capital of Culture. Art

“I do not believe that all of these problems can be solved just by a new law, or something that someone says, with teeth in it. For example, when we got into the Little Rock thing, it was not my province to talk about segregation or desegregation. I had the job of supporting a federal court that had issued a proper order under the Constitution, and where compliance was prevented by action that was unlawful.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Presidential news conference http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html (26 March 1958) 1950s

Law, Support, Problem

Quotes about talking page 38

Quotes about talking
page 38