Quotes about want
page 68

Primo Levi photo

“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I was fed up with books, which I still continued to gulp down with indiscreet voracity, and searched for a key to the highest truths; there must be a key, and I was certain that, owing to some monstrous conspiracy to my detriment and the world's, I would not get in school. In school they loaded with me with tons of notions that I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors."
It was enervating, nauseating, to listen to lectures on the problem of being and knowing, when everything around us was a mystery pressing to be revealed: the old wood of the benches, the sun's sphere beyond the windowpanes and the roofs, the vain flight of the pappus down in the June air. Would all the philosophers and all the armies of the world be able to construct this little fly? No, nor even understand it: this was a shame and an abomination, another road must be found.”

"Hydrogen"
The Periodic Table (1975)

Felix Adler photo
David Cameron photo
Andrew Bynum photo

“Close-out games are actually kind of easy. Teams tend to fold if you come out and play hard in the beginning, so we want to come out and establish an early lead and protect it.”

Andrew Bynum (1987) American basketball player

[McMenamin, Dave, Lakers want to end series Tuesday, May 9, 2012, ESPNLosAngeles.com, http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/7902623/2012-nba-playoffs-los-angeles-lakers-seek-early-close-series-denver-nuggets, http://www.webcitation.org/67cbXo08T, May 12, 2012]
Bynum in the 2012 NBA Playoffs saying the next game should be easy with the Lakers leading the series 3–1 against the Denver Nuggets and needing one more victory to advance to the next round. The Lakers eventually won 4–3.

“Just have a listen to my songs. If you still want to beat me up, you can.”

Zeki Müren (1931–1996) Turkish musician

Source: Turkey's 'David Bowie': Crowds flock to remember Zeki Muren, Selin Girit, 29 January 2015 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30942013,

William Saroyan photo

“A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

Martina Navrátilová photo
Peter Kenneth photo

“Look at all of us and dismiss the noise makers. Let us look for a leader who will serve the entire country. So all I ever want is to work for you. That is all.”

Peter Kenneth (1965) politician

During his visit to Tharaka Nithi constituency in Kenya in 2011
Hon.Peter Kenneth( Tharaka Nithi potential and KNC vision for kenya)m4v - Kenya Videos : Firstpost Topic - Page 1, firstpost.com, 2012, 16 July 2012 http://www.firstpost.com/topic/place/kenya-honpeter-kenneth-tharaka-nithi-potential-and-knc-vision-fo-video-dimiFuvM_PI-577-1.html,

Jeremy Clarkson photo
Guity Novin photo
Gore Vidal photo
Eugène Terre'Blanche photo

“[Self-determination] is one of the fundamental principles of democracy, the ability to rule yourself. They don't want to give us that. We are not free. We have everything a nation needs, except a land to call our own.”

Eugène Terre'Blanche (1941–2010) South African police officer, farmer, political activist, white supremacist

Interview by Antoinette Keyser http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=249083&area=/insight/insight__national/, (25 August 2005).

Mauno Koivisto photo

“I hate atheists because they want to become gods themselves and think they understand things that no one understands.”

Mauno Koivisto (1923–2017) President of Finland

Koivisto in an interview on a Russian radio channel on 26 June 2002. Presidentti Koiviston vierailu Moskovaan esillä venäläismediassa http://formin.finland.fi/public/?contentid=57319&contentlan=1&culture=fi-FI Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. 3 July 2002. Retrieved 12 July 2017.

Arnold Schwarzenegger photo
Dean Acheson photo
KatieJane Garside photo
Lorin Morgan-Richards photo
Edgar Guest photo

“The things are mighty few on earth
That wishes can attain.
Whate'er we want of any worth
We've got to work to gain.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Results and Roses, stanza 2, p. 57.
A Heap o' Livin' (1916)

Christina Aguilera photo

“"One cannot lose what one has not possessed."
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lose what I want. I want you.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

"The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz" II. King Log.
Poetry

Sarah Jessica Parker photo

“I've always been an actor. That's my job — I can be anything you want me to be.”

Sarah Jessica Parker (1965) American actress

Interview for Allure magazine, February 2008

Donald J. Trump photo
Ann Coulter photo
Jacob deGrom photo

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

“It [the drip-paintings of Jackson Pollock ] was original, and it was beautiful, and it was new, and it was saying the most that could be said in painting up to that point - and it really drew me in. I was in awe of it, and I wanted to get at why.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

remembering November 1950, when Greenberg escorted her to a show of Pollock's work at the Betty Parsons Gallery
1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

Yohji Yamamoto photo

“I want to achieve anti-fashion through fashion. That's why I'm always heading in my own direction, in parallel to fashion.”

Yohji Yamamoto (1943) Japanese fashion designer

Yohji Yamamoto. May I Help You? in Talking to Myself (2002), Ch. 9: Creation.

Hilary Duff photo
Bobby Fischer photo

“I'm very concerned because I think the Jews want to drive the elephants to extinction because the trunk of an elephant reminds them of an uncircumcised penis. I'm absolutely serious about that… Jews are sick, they're mental cases.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

Source: Radio Interview, July 6 2001 http://www.geocities.jp/bobbby_b/mp3/F_18_1.MP3

John F. Kennedy photo

“It's impossible to discover who you really are if you limit what you are willing to find out about yourself to only what you want to know.”

Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician

The Secret Way of Wonder

Alice Walker photo

“You're all I want! You're all I have! GO AWAY!.”

The Color Purple (1982)

Mark Tully photo

“I just knew I could not trust my sexuality to behave as a Christian priest should, And I didn't want to be a cause of scandal.”

Mark Tully (1935) British journalist

" Mark Tully: The voice of India http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1735083.stm," BBC News, 31 December 2001

Benjamin Graham photo

“Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter III, The Investor and His Advisers, p. 48

William Penn photo
John Gotti photo
Rahul Gandhi photo

“In India, we have a concept of caste. It has a concept of escape velocity. If one belongs to a backward caste and wants to attain success then one needs an escape velocity to attain that success. Dalits in this country need the escape velocity of Jupiter to attain success.”

Rahul Gandhi (1970) Indian politician

Quoted in Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera http://staff.stream.aljazeera.com/story/201310082109-0023097 NDTV, NDTV http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/a-dalit-needs-jupiter-s-escape-velocity-to-achieve-success-rahul-gandhi-429421?pfrom=home-lateststories

Harriet Beecher Stowe photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“I attended the Royal Opening of the Indian Conference yesterday…Our delegation is starting well, but Winston [Churchill] is in the depths of gloom. He wants the Conference to bust up quickly and the Tory Party to go back to pre-war and govern with a strong hand. He has become once more the subaltern of Hussars of '96.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to J. C. C. Davidson (13 November 1930), quoted in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910-1937 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 355.
1930

Theodore Dreiser photo
Jack Valenti photo

“We want to tell American parents that they and they alone have total power to control every hour of television programming that comes into their home.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

As quoted in "US TV industry plans June ad campaign on decency" Reuters news agency (24 April 2006) http://www.entertainment-news.org/breaking/50538/us-tv-industry-plans-june-ad-campaign-on-decency.html

Brian Fair photo

“I became a vegetarian many years ago after listening to The Smiths’ ‘Meat Is Murder.’ It opened my eyes to the painful lives of animals raised for food, and I knew I wanted no part of that.”

Brian Fair (1975) American singer

“Shadows Fall’s Brian Fair,” PSA for peta2.com (11 November 2011) https://www.peta2.com/news/shadows-falls-brian-fair/.

Morgan Murphy (food critic) photo

“If you truly want to learn a place, eat the food of its people.”

Morgan Murphy (food critic) (1972) Southern writer

Source: <i>Off the Eaten Path</i> (2011), p. 8

Eugene V. Debs photo
Henry Benjamin Whipple photo
Dylan Moran photo
Daniel Handler photo
Christian Scriver photo
Gene Vincent photo
Jerome David Salinger photo
William Jennings Bryan photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Elliott Smith photo
Angelique Rockas photo
George Soros photo

“The EU needs to transform itself into an association that countries like Britain would want to join, in order to strengthen the political case,’ Mr Soros said he was convinced it was the ideal time for the EU to reform itself and prepare the ground for the UK staying inside the bloc.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

On BREXIT (2018)
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-second-referendum-vote-george-soros-best-for-britain-gina-miller-a8375071.html

Herbert Hoover photo
Thierry Henry photo
Willa Cather photo
Fred Thompson photo

“After sleeping late on Sunday, I was back at my desk that afternoon. I had two prime considerations. First, I wanted to be certain that the tapes were not a trap for the committee or that there was a significant bit of missing information that we lacked; experience taught me that matters of this importance do not usually fall into your lap without more complications that are immediately apparent. Second, if our information was legitimate, I wanted to be sure the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action. Legalisms aside, it was inconceivable to me that the White House could withhold the tapes once their existence was made known. I believed it would be in everyone’s interest if the White House realized, before making any public statements, the probable position of both the majority and the minority of the Watergate committee. Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home. Buzhardt was the only White House staff member with whom I had had any substantial contact. He had been unassuming and straightforward in his dealings with me. He never tried to enlist me in any White House strategy, to suggest that I relay confidential information, or to so any of the things that were probably assumed by many of the so-called sophisticates in Washington.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

page 86
At That Point in Time, Warning the White House about the Watergate tapes

Dylan Moran photo
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick photo
Henry Adams photo
Navneet Aditya Waiba photo
Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Jeff Koons photo

“My work will use everything that it can to communicate. It will use any trick; it'll do anything — absolutely anything — to communicate and to win the viewer over. Even the most unsophisticated people are not threatened by it; they aren't threatened that this is something they have no understanding of. They can look at it and they can participate with it. And also somebody who has been very highly educated in art and deals with more esoteric areas can also view it and find that the work is open as far as being something that wants to add more to our culture. The work wants to meet the needs of' the people. It tries to bring down all the barriers that block people From their culture. that shield and hide them. It tells them to embrace the moment instead of always feeling that they're being indulged by things that they do not participate in. It tells them to believe in something and to eject their will. The idea of St. John and baptism right now is that there are greater things to come. And it's about embracing guilt and shame and moving forward instead of letting this negative society always thwart us — always a more negative society, always more negative.”

Jeff Koons (1955) American artist

Partly cited in: Linda Weintraub, Arthur Coleman Danto, Thomas McEvilley. Art on the edge and over: searching for art's meaning in contemporary society, 1970s-1990s. Art Insights, Inc., 1996. p. 201; And cited in Kristine Stiles, ‎Peter Howard Selz (1996). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. p. 381
"From Full Phantom Five," 1988

Norodom Sihanouk photo

“I want my country to be independent, always independent. I have to defend my convictions as a patriot and as a national leader. I have done my best, but as a human being I cannot be perfect, nobody is perfect.”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

As quoted by David Ablin and Marlowe Hood (March 14, 1985), "The Lesser Evil: An Interview with Norodom Sihanouk" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/mar/14/the-lesser-evil-an-interview-with-norodom-sihanouk/?pagination=false, The New York Review of Books.
Interviews

Stokely Carmichael photo
Karl Rove photo
Mamie Van Doren photo
Pat Condell photo
Mark Skousen photo
Niccolo Machiavelli photo

“It is enough to ask somebody for his weapons without saying 'I want to kill you with them', because when you have his weapons in hand, you can satisfy your desire.”

Book 1, Ch 44 (as translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella)
Discourses on Livy (1517)

Sören Kierkegaard photo

“But it never occurred to him to want to be a philosopher, or dedicate himself to Speculation; he was still too fickle for that. True, he was not drawn now to one thing and now to another – thinking was and remained his passion – but he still lacked the self-discipline required for acquiring a deeper coherence. Both the significant and the insignificant attracted him equally as points of departure for his pursuits; the result was not of great consequence – only the movements of thought as such interested him. Sometimes he noticed that he reached one and the same conclusion from quite different starting points, but this did not in any deeper sense engage his attention. His delight was always just to be pressing on; wherever he suspected a labyrinth, he had to find the way. Once he had started, nothing could bring him to a halt. If he found the going difficult and became tired of it before he ought, he would adopt a very simple remedy – he would shut himself up in his room, make everything as festive as possible, and then say loudly and clearly: I will do it. He had learned from his father that one can do what one wills, and his father’s life had not discredited this theory. Experiencing this had given Johannes indescribable pride; that there could be something one could not do when one willed it was unbearable to him. But his pride did not in the least indicate weakness of will, for when he had uttered these energetic words he was ready for anything; he then had a still higher goal – to penetrate the intricacies of the problem by force of will. This again was an adventure that inspired him. Indeed his life was in this way always adventurous. He needed no woods and wanderings for his adventures, but only what he possessed – a little room with one window.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Johannes Climacus p. 22-23
1840s, Johannes Climacus (1841)

Mike Oldfield photo

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo
Mike Tyson photo

“1987: "I could have knocked him out in the third round but I wanted to do it slowly, so he would remember this night for a long time."”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.boxing-monthly.co.uk/content/0008/three.htm
On boxing

George Bernard Shaw photo
Thandie Newton photo

“A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ernesto Sábato
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Donald J. Trump photo

“Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliche.This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

Roberto Clemente photo

“I want play but back hurt. If I no can play good, I no help team. So I wait until pain goes away. I no swing bat good, no run good, no catch ball like old times. I try but pain, she too much. Some days, no pain. Other days, pain all time. Some days pain so much I theenk maybe I quit baseball. But I need money so I play baseball.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted and paraphrased in "Aching Back Puts Clemente On Bench Again" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=nUEqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BU4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=7330%2C2562781 by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Friday, July 26, 1957), p. 20
Baseball-related, <big><big>1950s</big></big>, <big>1957</big>
Context: "I want play but back hurt. If I no can play good, I no help team. So I wait until pain goes away. I no swing bat good, no run good, no catch ball like old times. I try but pain, she too much. Some days, no pain. Other days, pain all time. Some days pain so much I theenk maybe I quit baseball. But I need money so I play baseball." Clemente doesn't even want to think of an operation on his back. He says he had two brothers and a sister who died following surgery and his family opposes operations.

Mark Pattison photo
Kage Baker photo
Muammar Gaddafi photo
Phyllis Schlafly photo

“American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth. We can do anything we want to do.”

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) American activist

Cultural Conservatism and the Religious Right https://www.c-span.org/video/?c3858491/phyllis-schlafly, C-SPAN.org (April 4, 2012)

Rachael Ray photo
Michael Greger photo

“By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States. So the question for most of us is not whether we should eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether we want to reverse the heart disease we may already have.”

Michael Greger (1972) American physician, author, and vegan health activist

"Heart Disease Starts in Childhood" https://nutritionfacts.org/video/heart-disease-starts-in-childhood/?utm_content=buffer364bf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer, in NutritionFacts.org (23 September 2013).