Quotes about week
page 6

“My, I get so depressed after a poor meal; that's why I can never stay in England for more than a week.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

Letter to Avis DeVoto, January 30, 1953, collected in As Always Julia ed. Joan Reardon, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.”

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

Screenwipe S4E1
Screenwipe

Beauty

“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.”

Frederik Pohl book Gateway

Gateway (1978)

Love, Hate, Way, Personality

“It was in November 1919 that I made my first contact with The Tibetan… I heard what I thought was a clear note of music which sounded from the sky, through the hill and in me. Then I heard a voice which said, "There are some books which it is desired should be written for the public. You can write them. Will you do so?" Without a moment's notice I said, "Certainly not. I'm not a darned psychic and I don't want to be drawn into anything like that." I was startled to hear myself speaking out loud. The voice went on to say that wise people did not make snap judgments, that I had a peculiar gift for the higher telepathy and that what I was being asked to do embodied no aspect of the lower psychism. I replied that I didn't care, that I wasn't interested in any work of a psychic nature at all. The unseen person who was speaking so clearly and directly to me then said that he would give me time for consideration; that he would not take my answer then and that he would come back in three weeks' time exactly, to find out what I intended to do.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter IV - Part 2

People, Books, Music, Nature

“While I always wait for the final details of any piece of legislation before deciding whether to support it or not, the framework released last week emphasized two main goals that I wholeheartedly support: economic growth and simplicity.”

Ted Budd (1971) American politician

Why we need tax reform http://www.greensboro.com/opinion/columns/u-s-rep-ted-budd-why-we-need-tax-reform/article_7ce96e8e-96d8-5a6d-9f5c-5e9bb26c3a36.html (October 23, 2017)

Support, Waiting

“The major challenges of climate change, the major challenge of the economy and manufacturing, the major challenges in education, and how do we turbo-charge our national education system to create the knowledge base for the future of the Australian economy. These are the sorts of areas that you're going to see detailed policy plans from us in the weeks and months ahead…”

Kevin Rudd (1957) Australian politician, 26th Prime Minister of Australia

Rudd's new vision for the nation, 5 December 2006, 13 February 2008, ABC Local Radio http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1804299.htm, 2006

Education, Knowledge, Change, Future

“I fought the director for a week to stay blonde, but, eventually, I had to give in. It's amazing how differently people react to you if you're not a blonde. Shortly after I'd dyed it, I walked past a building site and got no reaction whatsoever, and then I tried to get a cab and not one stopped. Getting a cab in London is difficult at the best of times, but being blonde certainly helps.”

Alice Evans (1971) British actress

"She may have lost a Picasso..." The Daily Express, 15 January 2001.

People, Time, Past, Help

“In the beginning I used to make one terrible play a game. Then I got so I'd make one a week and finally I'd pull a bad one about once a month. Now, I'm trying to keep it down to one a season.”

Lou Gehrig (1903–1941) American baseball player

SPORT Magazine's All-Time All Stars (Quentin Reynolds)

Game, Season

“In Afghanistan, a determined people are working to overcome decades of tyranny, and protect their newly free society. They have strong support from all 26 nations of the NATO Alliance. I appreciate the United Nations' decision this week to renew the mandate for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. The United Nations is also an active civilian presence in Afghanistan, where experts are doing important work helping to improve education, facilitate humanitarian aid, and protect human rights. We must continue to help the Afghan people defend their young democracy so the Taliban does not return to power, and Afghanistan is never again a safe haven for terror.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

People, Education, Democracy, Support

“The scene has thoroughly changed. The six weeks' march to Paris has come world drama. Mass murder has become a monotonous task, and yet the final solution is not one step nearer. Capitalist rule is caught in its own trap, and cannot ban the spirit that it has Gone is the first mad delirium. Gone are the patriotic street demonstrations, the chase after suspicious-looking automobiles; the false telegrams, the cholera-poisoned wells. Gone the mad stories of Russian students who hurl bombs from every bridge of Berlin, or French men flying over Nuremberg; gone the excesses of spy-hunting populace, the singing through, the coffee shops with their patriotic songs; gone the violent mobs, ready to denounce, ready to persecute women, ready to whip themselves into a delirious frenzy over every wild rumor; gone the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air that left the policeman at the corer as the only remaining representative of human dignity.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Junius Pamphlet (1915), Ch.1

Women, Men, World, Coffee

“The toughest thing about performing here is, where do you go from here? Next week, I'm at the Fort Lauderdale Performing Arts Center.”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

The Carnegie Hall Performance (2006)

Art

“It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 7

Dreams, Reality, Appearance, Personality

“When it's claimed, as it was last week on British television, that Muslims in Britain are victims of British intolerance — yeah right, 1600 mosques worth of intolerance so far, and still building — I think the truth is that, if they are victims of anything, it's Muslim intolerance, because if you are an ordinary Muslim, then surely the last thing you need is a bunch of Islamists speaking for you, because everything they do and say reflects back on you. When they try to force unwanted Islamic values into our education system, for example, or when one of their representatives crudely insults this country by comparing it with Nazi Germany, that reflects on all Muslims, because these people speak for all Muslims. Don't they? No? Well maybe somebody should tell them that.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Islam is not a victim" (20 July 2008) http://youtube.com/watch?v=5F5aCUNE4Z8 2008

People, Truth, Education, Thinking

“Sure, sure I wanted out of this game. But I don't care what these writers say. My neck was wrenched about two weeks ago and I aggravated it when I continued to play. But I didn't want to miss any games when we are trying to win the pennant. We caught the Mets and we came here tonight leading them, and I think I had something to do with it. Like I say, I don't care what these writers think. They never believe me when I say I hurt. One time before, they wrote so much about me just imagining my back was hurting me that the manager decided to have me checked over by a specialist. I never did see the report, but Danny said he had been assured my complaint was legitimate, and that he was sorry there had been a misunderstanding. I couldn't know what he meant, but after that he never failed to ask about my back before he put my name in the lineup for the second game of doubleheaders.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "All-Star Case of Roberto Clemente" by Sam Lacy, in The Baltimore Afro-American (July 21, 1970)
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>

Imagination, Game, Thinking, Time

“A week after the attack, one is free to taste the bile of its atrocious ingenuity. It is already trite — but stringently necessary — to emphasise that such a mise en scène would have embarrassed a studio executive's storyboard or a thriller-writer's notebook ("What happened today was not credible," were the wooden words of Tom Clancy, the author of The Sum of All Fears). And yet in broad daylight and full consciousness that outline became established reality: a score or so of Stanley knives produced two million tons of rubble.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Fear and loathing" (2001)

Fear, Reality

“This week, Donald Trump introduced a new twelve-inch doll of himself that speaks seventeen different phrases, which is amazing, as that's five more than the real Donald Trump.”

Amy Poehler (1971) American actress

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/04/04aupdate.phtml
Weekend Update samples

“I can tell you that I may be a lot of things but I am not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004, I laid it all out there. And you’re right, on a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren’t in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And you know, I‘m embarrassed by it. I‘m very sorry I said it. I have said that, you know, it just didn‘t jive with what I had written about and knew to be the truth. So I know that it is something that some people have said, “Wait a minute. What happened here?””

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

But I have talked about this and written about it and then, unfortunately, in a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past. April 16, 2008, Pennsylvania Democratic Presidential Debate, Philadelphia, when asked about her dishonesty concerning her recent comments about Bosnia. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iySWjciIrjB8hbu450lIABfnYcjwD903ANA80 http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cm_Cj6LNWmw http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/us/politics/16text-debate.html?pagewanted=9&_r=1 Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

People, Truth, Books, Waiting

“Suppose [he said to the Americans] that it was a familiar thought in your minds that there never was at any moment of the year within the limits of your State more than seven weeks food for the population, and that that food had to be replenished by overseas communication…Then you will understand why every citizen of the British Empire, whether he comes from the far Dominions of the Pacific, or the small island in the North Sea, can never forget…that without sea communication he, and the Empire to which he belongs, would perish.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Speech to the second meeting of the Washington Naval Conference (1921), quoted in Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour, K.G., O.M., F.R.S., Etc. 1906–1930 (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1936), p. 236.

Food, Communication, Understanding, Sea

“Theresa May confirmed today that for years to come Britain will not have control of its borders. Instead we will have an unspecified transitional period after we leave, with no timeframe planned or announced. Yet again voters are being ignored by the political establishment. If Theresa May genuinely wanted to leave the EU then she would have used her speech today to announce that she is going to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act. We could be out of the EU within a single week. It is now over 200 days since the British people voted to leave the EU on June 23rd. The Tories seem to be doing everything they can to stall Brexit as long as they possibly can. We must be careful about Theresa May. When she was Home Secretary she gave several big speeches about controlling immigration. Then she opened the borders wider than the Labour Party. While some of the statements today sound good, her record for delivery is one of the worst for any politician in Westminster. We simply can’t trust her.”

Tim Aker (1985) British politician

Theresa May doesn’t want to control immigration http://www.timakermep.org/site/theresa-may-doesnt-want-to-control-immigration/ (January 17, 2017)

People, Home, Communication

“During life, a spirit is held to the body by his semi-material envelope, or perispirit. Death is the destruction of the body only, but not of this second envelope, which separates itself from the body when the play of organic life ceases in the latter. Observation shows us that the separation of the perispirit from the body is not suddenly completed at the moment of death, but is only effected gradually, and more or less slowly in different individuals. In some cases it is effected so quickly that the perispirit is entirely separated from the body within a few hours of the death of the latter but in other cases, and especially in the case of those whose life has been grossly material and sensual, this deliverance is much less rapid, and sometimes takes days, weeks, and even months, for its accomplishment. This delay does not imply the slightest persistence of vitality in the body, nor any possibility of its return to life, but is simply the result of a certain affinity between the body and the spirit which affinity is always more or less tenacious in proportion to the preponderance of materiality in the affections of the spirit during his earthly life.”

Allan Kardec (1804–1869) systematizer of Spiritism

Source: The Spirits' Book, p. 116.

Life, Death

“My wife and I had an argument last week that was so stupid, it bears repeating. My wife collects twist ties. Welcome to my world.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Cheap Drunk: An Autobiography (2002)

Stupidity, World

“I reacted to Cézanne almost the same way as you [= Rosalyn Drexler ], the first time I saw him when I was 14... Then I saw my first Cezanne and it jolted me. It was a 'Bathers' [Cézanne painted several of them]. I didn't think he drew well at all. I thought the figures looked stiff and wooden, but I was enthralled by it. I knew there was something there that was going to take me a lifetime to understand. What I took to be the crudity of his technique — that opened a door for me. I began to look at everything differently. That was the year [1932] I discovered Matisse, Picasso, Degas, Soutine — I began to go to the Museum of Modern Art every week. At the same time, I loved New Yorker covers — and El Greco. I didn't mind mixing things up. Nobody was going to tell me what to like or what not to like. Until I was 17 I thought all real artists (I didn't count commercial artists) were dead or foreign with the exceptions of Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, whose work I had seen at 'An American Place.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Love, Art, Way, Understanding

“The right hon. Gentleman should be aware that, two weeks ago, I had an interesting meeting with an environmental campaigning group from the Soviet Union who openly admitted that the industrial policies followed in the past by the Soviet Union and many countries in central and eastern Europe had done a great deal of environmental damage. The difference is that those people felt that they had the power to change the policies to stop the destruction of their own environment. The policies of free-market economies which the right hon. Gentleman propounds have led to the pollution of the North sea and the Irish sea, the destruction of the rain forests in Brazil and Malaysia and long-term serious environmental damage by multinational companies all over the southern countries of this planet.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/dec/15/future-of-socialism in the House of Commons (15 December 1989). 1980s

People, Change, Past, Sea

“In the final weeks of my seminary days, shortly after Dr. King's death, I found myself becoming consumed by feelings of animosity and anger. I was disenchanted with my church and my country. I was tired of being in the minority, and I was tired of turning the other cheek. I, along with many blacks, found ways to protest and try to change the treatment we received in this country. Perhaps my passion for Richard Wright novels was affecting me. Perhaps it was listening too intently to Nina Simone. Perhaps, like Bigger Thomas, I was being consumed by the circumstances in which I found myself, circumstances that I saw as responding only to race.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Death, Way, Feeling, Passion

“Last week we revoked his Godhead; we caught him operating a life without a license.”

Robert Sheckley book Mindswap

Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 32 (p. 153)

Life

“You have to work years in hit shows to make people sick and tired of you, but you can accomplish this in a few weeks on television.”

Walter Slezak (1902–1983) actor

As quoted in Return of the Portable Curmudgeon (1995), edited by Jon Winokur, p. 290

People

“The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. "I said a week," Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. "You took your own good time." "Balls," Case said, smiling at the screen. "That's good work, Armitage." "Yes," Armitage admitted, "but don't let it go to your head. Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy."”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Smile, Sense, Time

“This means that if in a city seven accidents occur each week, then (assuming that all possible distributions are equally likely) practically all weeks will contain days with two or more accidents, and on the average only one week out of 165 will show a uniform distribution of one accident per day.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter II, Elements Of Combinatorial Analysis, p. 32.

“You're welcome to take a bath. You look like the second week of the garbage strike.”

Neil Simon (1927–2018) playwright, writer, academic

Evy, in The Gingerbread Lady (1970); cited from The Collected Plays of Neil Simon (New York: Random House, 1971) vol. 2, p. 76

“My father’s mother, a pure-blooded Indian from Oaxaca, had been a gifted fifteen-year-old when Benito Juárez won Mexico’s independence from France. They’d taken her to the Academy of blah-blah-blah in Mexico City, and she’d astonished her European professors by learning French in six weeks.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Learning

“I made the mistake of watching "A. I." on cable the week they showed it about 792 times, and I ended up watching it every time it was on.”

Joe Bob Briggs (1953) American film critic, writer, and actor; alter ego of John Bloom

A.I. review http://www.joebobbriggs.com/drivein/2003/AI.html

Time

“Last week, i… i extended a hand to the WWE Universe in a much needed intervention. You know, i don't know if you people know this or not, but i'm not the only one who knows that pills and cigarettes and alcohol are harmful. Medical science has proven this, so there's a surgeon general put in place to put warning labels on all of these products. I guess he's just there to warn the smart people that already know, huh? This is my crusade, and i will continue my crusade for as long as there are people who need help, as long as there are people out there who need change in their lives. One person in particular i've been helping for quite some time now, i'd like to introduce him to the world. Ladies and gentlemen, i give you… Luke Gallows. (Gallows raises his fist) That's right, some of you may recognize him as "Festus", but that was a lifetime ago. And it's a lifetime that he'd just as soon regret. It's a lifetime of torturous drug abuse and neglect, you see, it started just like it started for all of you people, one, one little pill. Just one little pill to take the edge off, one painkiller. And then one turns to two, two turns to four, four turns to eight, so on and so forth. And sure, his friends, his family were there, but they enabled him. They didn't help him, they thought they were but they were slowly rotting him from the inside out. But then i helped him, just like i could help all of you. Trust me, this is just the start, this doesn't end here, it begins here and now. I will continue to reach out and help those who can't help themselves. Holds up brown paper bag On December 1st, this is scary, people, pay attention. On December 1st, a very dangerous addictive new drug hits the streets. Now this scares me because it's a socially accepted over-the-counter drug and it's gonna be widely available all over the world. And it's scary because it's more dangerous than any prescribed medication, it's more harmful than chain smoking an entire carton of unfiltered cigarettes, it is more dangerous than corroding your liver with a fifth of gin or vodka and then chasing it with your Daddy's favorite beer. (Punk pulls a Jeff Hardy DVD out of the bag) "Jeff Hardy, My Life, My Rules" And what an appropriate title, for a loser who destroyed his life and his career living by his rules. And what makes me sick to my stomach is Jeff didn't just ruin his life, he didn't just end his career. (Crowd chants Hardy) He ruined the lives of all his fans because he's planted seeds of destruction in all of the people, all of the drug addicts like yourself who actually looked up to the Charismatic Enabler like he was some sort of a prophet. Well, if you people have any brain-cells left, if there's anything left of your memory that's not burnt out, all you need to know is that the last chapter of this DVD is the most important one you need to watch because it tells the whole story. It's a cage match between myself and Jeff Hardy, where i ended Jeff's career in the WWE… FOREVER! I'm the reason he's not here! And I know how hard it is to deprogram your weak little brains from all the lies you've been fed all over the years, but you owe it to yourselves. Look yourself in the mirror, search inside yourself for that shred of self-respect that might be left, and when it comes to this, when it comes to this garbage, (Holds up DVD) just say no.”

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

November 27, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Life, People, Alcohol, World

“Up until I came here this week, and I met so many women and young girls who feel, to use their word - and I'm a bit embarrassed, but it's a good word - empowered, by watching. I realized this isn't a burden, this is an honor.”

Lucy Lawless (1968) New Zealand actress

Christy Slewinski, New York Daily News (September 29, 1996) "Lucy Lawless is a Star on the Strength of 'Xena'", The Seattle Times, p. 21.

Women, Feeling, Girl

“French troops arrived in Afghanistan last week, and not a minute too soon. The French are acting as advisers to the Taliban, to teach them how to surrender properly.”

Jay Leno (1950) American comedian, actor, writer, producer, voice actor and television host

The Tonight Show, November 26, 2004
French Bashing and Francophobia

“On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

2 page advertisement sponsored by Dresser Industries in the Wall Street Journal (31 July 1979)

People, Health, Suffering, Heart

“The old get older
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We're takin' over
Come on!”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

"Five to One" on the album Waiting for the Sun (1968)

“Among those who were sent to receive political indoctrination in June 1919 was a 30-year-old corporal who had been in the Bavarian army since the beginning of the war and had stayed in it through all the vicissitudes of Social Democracy, anarchy and Communism, taking part in demonstrations, wearing a red armband along with the rest of his comrades, and disappearing from the scene with most of them when they had been ordered to defend Munich against the invading forces in the proceeding weeks. His name was Adolf Hitler.”

Richard J. Evans (1947) British historian

Source: The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), p. 161

War, Democracy, Communication, Parting

“Where have you been, Shelly? Bruce and Harriet Nyborg. Do you want to see the memos…? They're nuts… they used to call in every week […] Did you see how they were living? […] The people are insane. They just like talking to salesmen.”

David Mamet Glengarry Glen Ross

Glengarry Glen Ross (1993), John Williamson

People

“The twenty-six-year-old Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler youth, who could boast of standing close to Hitler, declared bluntly in those revolutionary June weeks: ‘A socialist and anti-capitalist attitude is the most salient characteristic of the Young National Socialist Germany.”

Konrad Heiden (1901–1966) German journalist and historian

Source: Der Fuehrer, Hitler’s Rise to Power (1944), p. 501

Youth

“The situation in Greece just goes from bad to worse. We’ve now got a situation where there was the big suicide a few weeks ago, where a 77-year-old man shot himself in the head outside the Greek Parliament. That was the public face of what’s gone wrong.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

Segment from an article on the UKIP website, 31 May 2012. On the edge of social breakdown http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news/2681-on-the-edge-of-social-breakdown 2012

Suicide

“All I can say is if this is a hurricane then East Tennessee has one about every other week. Seriously. It's not that bad.Some minor wind and intermittent light to medium rain. Nothing bad at all yet.”

Stacey Campfield (1968) US politician

2012-08-27
Ron Paul and the Tampa hurricane convention.
Camp4U
http://lastcar.blogspot.com/2012/08/in-florida-and-ron-paul.html, quoted in * 2012-08-28
Blogging from RNC, Campfield Keeps Sensitive Side in Check
Jeff
Woods
Nashville Scene
http://www.nashvillescene.com/pitw/archives/2012/08/28/blogging-from-rnc-campfield-keeps-sensitive-side-in-check
Regarding the Republican National Convention being postponed because of Hurricane Isaac

Light

“Over the past few weeks, as the world commemorates Nelson Mandela, an uncomfortable spotlight has been shone on Conservatives who branded the ANC as terrorists in the 1980s,” he says in an article on the UK ConservativeHome website. How will today’s crop of Conservative climate refuseniks explain themselves to future generations, in a world made hotter, nasty and poor by global warming? There is nothing Conservative about advocating for the destruction of the climate, and thus all we hold dear. This is not a credible Conservative standpoint: it is reckless and extreme.”

Mohamed Nasheed (1967) Maldivian politician, 4th president of the Maldives

Quoted on BBC News, "Mohamed Nasheed: climate denying Conservatives “risk irrelevancy”" http://www.rtcc.org/2014/01/14/mohamed-nasheed-climate-denying-conservatives-risk-irrelevancy/, January 14, 2014.

World, Past, Future

“Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf. Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

" Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html", The Times, May 18, 2005 Testimony before the US Senate on May 17, 2005.

World, Justice, Idea, Question

“Lets you and I try to live on food stamps in New Jersey (high cost of living) and feed a family for a week or month. U game?”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

[Fallon, Kevin, Cory Booker Rescues a Freezing Dog & 9 Other Things He Has Saved, https://www.thedailybeast.com/cory-booker-rescues-a-freezing-dog-and-9-other-things-he-has-saved?ref=scroll, 21 August 2018, The Daily Beast, January 26, 2013]
Via Twitter, in response to a tweet asking "Why is there a family today that is ‘too poor’ to afford breakfast?" Booker would go on to do exactly that. He later told CBS that it had been a "terrible state of human existence", and continued "I'll be honest with you. I take so much for granted, even going to Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee is more than my daily food allowance right now," as quoted in [Bailey, Holly, Cory Booker’s week on food stamps: political ambition amid the burned sweet potatoes, https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/ticket/cory-booker-week-food-stamps-political-ambition-amid-101008142--election.html, 21 August 2018, Yahoo! News, December 11, 2012]
2012

Family, Food, Game

“If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

How to Seem (and Be) Deep http://lesswrong.com/lw/k8/how_to_seem_and_be_deep/ (October 2007)

People

“Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such—and those living more peaceably around them—we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 35 (pp. 483-484).

War, Nature, Universe, Science

“One of my duties, this week, is to open the new Ustinov college," he confesses, "and while I'm delighted that Durham should honour its former chancellor this way — and I sincerely hope it continues this tradition for me — I can't help feeling that an American university would only have done so had the chancellor also handed over a substantial amount of dosh.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Bill Bryson: The accidental chancellor (November 15, 2005)

Hope, Way, Feeling, Universe

“Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U. S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. … Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost. Today's aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse.”

Peter Thiel (1967) American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager

In an editorial http://www.nationalreview.com/article/278758/end-future-peter-thiel published by National Review (2011)

Men, Money, War, Health

“All the nation has been saddened by the extent to which the country has fallen during the last week. I have therefore, with much reluctance, assumed executive authority.”

Frank Bainimarama (1954) Prime Minister of Fiji

(29 May 2000, announcing that he had taken over the government from President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara
2000

Country

“South African schoolchildren set a world record this week by creating the world's longest clothesline. Hey, what do South Africans wash their clothes with? Apar-Tide!”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

28 June 2004.
Dennis Miller

World, Clothes

“Charlie Gibson: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?Sarah Palin: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

ABC News interview http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5782924&page=2, 2014

“Allen of Bath procured them the same honours from thence; and for some weeks it rained gold boxes: Chester, Worcester, Norwich, Bedford, Salisbury, Yarmouth, Tewkesbury, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Stirling, and other populous and chief towns following the example. Exeter, with singular affection, sent boxes of heart of oak.”

Horace Walpole (1717–1797) English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician

"The sending of boxes to William Pitt in 1757" in Memoirs of the Reign of King George II (London, 1846–47), Vol. II, p. 202

Heart, Box

“It is my firm belief that the only satisfactory test of economics is the ability to predict, and in crucial predictive situations such as reconversion after World War II, the settlement of the Korean War, the settlement of the Vietnam War, the abrupt economic policy switch of the Nixon Administration in August 1972, the oil shock of 1973 (forecast of a world-wide succession by LINK), the recession of 1990. In these crucial periods, econometric models outperformed other approaches, yet there is considerable room for improvement, and that is precisely what is being examined in development of high-frequency models that aim to forecast the economy, every week, every fortnight, or every month, depending on the degree of fineness of the information flow.”

Lawrence Klein (1920–2013) American economist

War, World, Success, Dependency

“I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.”

Paul Desmond (1924–1977) American jazz musician

About the value of practice
Unsourced

“I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.”

Upton Sinclair book The Profits of Religion

Introductory, "Bootstrap-lifting"
The Profits of Religion (1918)

Life, Time

“I was going to be lynched. I had to go into hiding in the mountains for two weeks.”

Patrick McGoohan (1928–2009) actor

When The Prisoner had an inconclusive ending Daily Mail, 15th January 2009 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1116243/How-star-stage-Patrick-McGoohan-Prisoner-success-switching-screen.html

Mountain

“I hate the way that you are so sarcastic, and you're not very bright. You think that everything you've done's fantastic, your music's shite it keeps me up all night.
And it will be nice to be alone, for a week or two, but I know then I will be right, right back here with you”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Married With Children
Definitely Maybe (1994)

Hate, Music, Way, Thinking

“This is very simple in the world of chicks: some are hoochies, some are not, and some should never try to be. It's no different from the idea of sports. Now, I can go on my little rowing machine for four times a week, twenty-two minutes a time, and I can feel as if I flirt with the sporting world. Similar to the idea that a woman can put on something cuter for her man, for those moments, and flirt with garments that a hoochie woman might be pushing. But never for one moment should you get confused. My little rowing machine and I cannot consider ourselves athletes. Wearing the same garment does not a hoochie woman make. So if you are a true hoochie woman, may garments below the navel always be in your future. If you are not, then please don't throw away your cotton zippy jacket.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

From her book Piece by Piece.

World, Feeling, Idea, Sport

“There's an ideological fervor about this prosecution that's almost religious in its intensity, because let's be clear, this is a heresy trial by any other name. They can't refute Mr. Wilders' statements, so instead they've resorted to the kind of cheap legal stunt we'd expect from the likes of Mugabe to shut their opponent up. They've accused him of being divisive and inflammatory, and yes, sometimes the truth can be divisive and inflammatory if it has been suppressed for long enough and has become sufficiently taboo, as it clearly has in the Netherlands, because according to the prosecution it doesn't even matter that what he says is true; what matters is that it's illegal. Well, when the truth is against the law, then there's something seriously wrong with the law, because when the truth is no defence, there is no defence, and the law has no anchor, so it will drift wherever the wind of political expedience blows, and this week it blew straight into a crooked courtroom in Amsterdam, where justice will now be made to fight for its life, starved of the oxygen of truth that gives it life.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

On the trial of Geert Wilders, "The crooked judges of Amsterdam" (5 February 2010) http://youtube.com/watch?v=96ZUZ9CPZII 2010

Life, Truth, Justice, Law

“Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years.”

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) scientist and inventor known for his work on the telephone

Bell Telephone Talk (1901)

Life, Animals

“[on Valentine's cards] Just last week I wrote "I still love you. See last year's card for full details."”

Michael McIntyre (1976) British comedian

Live and Laughing (2008)

Love

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech at Newton, Montgomeryshire (4 March 1972), from The Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out (Elliot Right Way Books, 1973), pp. 57-8
1970s

Life, Death, People, World

“(On the 2006 US Midterm Elections) This week, in an ironic turn of events, Iraq brought regime change to the United States.”

Amy Poehler (1971) American actress

citation needed
Weekend Update samples

Change

“I had almost no education. I hardly went to school. I’d be away for weeks doing films, then I’d come back and have no idea what they were talking about. Of course the other kids loved it: ‘You may be a well-known star but you don’t know how to do algebra.’ It was a nightmare.”

Petula Clark (1932) British actress and singer

Calgary Herald, 14 Feb 2013

Love, Education, School, Star

“In the last couple of weeks everyone has been asking how on earth the greatest and most powerful nation on earth could be so crippled by a bit of wind and rain.
The rest of the world has natural disasters without the whole of society faling to pieces. So why is it different in America?
Well, if you stop and think about it, the answer is obvious.
America may have given the world the space shuttle and, er, condensed milk, but behind the veneer of civilisation most Americans barely have the brains to walk on their back legs.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

"Flood that released America's demons", The Sun, September 10, 2005

World, Nature, Thinking

“Jobs: Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. We all brought to this a sort of “liberal arts” air, an attitude that we wanted to pull the best that we saw into this field. You don’t get that if you are very narrow.
Cringley: How does the Web affect the economy?
Jobs: We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time. The reason Federal Express won over its competitors was its package-tracking system. For the company to bring that package-tracking system onto the Web is phenomenal. I use it all the time to track my packages. It's incredibly great. Incredibly reassuring. And getting that information out of most companies is usually impossible.
But it's also incredibly difficult to give information. Take auto dealerships. So much money is spent on inventory—billions and billions of dollars. Inventory is not a good thing. Inventory ties up a ton of cash, it's open to vandalism, it becomes obsolete. It takes a tremendous amount of time to manage. And, usually, the car you want, in the color you want, isn't there anyway, so they've got to horse-trade around. Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of all that inventory? Just have one white car to drive and maybe a laserdisc so you can look at the other colors. Then you order your car and you get it in a week.”

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

Robert X. Cringley for a Public Broadcasting System [PBS] television series, “Triumph of the Nerds” (1995), “The Lost Interview: Steve Jobs Tells Us What Really Matters” https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/17/the-lost-interview-steve-jobs-tells-us-what-really-matters/#5cb0fc8e6c3a, Forbes, Steve Denning, Nov 17, 2011, 1990s

Money, People, World, Art

“I've been blogging — however irregularly — over at Amazon. com for a few years now, but I've always felt that arena was for the "official" JMD. It was as if I was standing in the aisle of a book store, greeting potential readers: sharing my thoughts, certainly — but also trying to get them interested in my wares. I'm hoping that this blog will be more like a living room: a little more casual and personal. A place where I can talk about, well, anything that comes to mind, from the trivial to the profound. And I hope to do it at least once a week.”

J.M. DeMatteis (1953) comics illustrator

I'll wait a moment for the laughter to die down. "Welcome (A Day Late)" (10 September 2009) http://www.jmdematteis.com/2009_09_01_archive.html. J.M. DeMatteis's CREATION POINT (2009 – present)

Books, Hope, Laughter, Waiting

“When you look at February's (2011) deficit spending alone, and the fact that it was larger than what our total deficit spending was in 2007, the proposals that the Senate is sending us simply are ridiculous, because it's not even a solution. It doesn't address the amount of spending that we have in a week's time. We need to get serious.”

Kristi Noem (1971) South Dakota politician

Reisner, Hiram. Rep. Noem: Senate Budget Proposals ‘Ridiculous’ http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/Noem-Budget-Proposals-Ridiculous/2011/03/11/id/389116, NewsMax, March 11, 2011.

Time

“(on cockroaches living without a head for a week) Why, when it was invented, has it got that facility?”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Xfm 18 January 2003
On Nature

“This cricket is like a burger, you can have it once a week but for a whole meal, you need to return to Test cricket. More than once a week, and it will give you a tummy ache.”

Navjot Singh Sidhu (1963) Indian cricketer and politician

On Twenty20 cricket, in "Twenty20 game is 'underwear' cricket: Sidhu" in Daily News and Analysis (17 July 2006).

“Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take six weeks; Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with the present interruptions it would require two hundred.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 21

Hope

“I am going to negotiate with the IMF on the basis of our existing policies, not changes in policies, and I need your support to do it. (Applause) But when I say "existing policies", I mean things we do not like as well as things we do like. It means sticking to the very painful cuts in public expenditure (shouts from the floor) on which the Government has already decided. It means sticking to a pay policy which enables us, as the TUC resolved a week or two ago, to continue the attack on inflation. (Shout of, "Resign".)”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Speech at the Labour Party Conference (30 September 1976), quoted in Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1976, p. 319. Healey had been forced to abandon plans to attend an international finance ministers' conference in order to speak to the conference because of a run on the pound.
1970s

Pain, Support, Change

“I'd like to be able to go on holiday and not to have to hold my belly in for two whole weeks.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

Of his fear that paparazzi would take unflattering photos http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/8932864/Sir-Paul-McCartney-had-phone-hacked.html

Holiday

“Also, I love my google ads. I have no idea if I make a dime off them, and in fact would pay to have them for what they add to the overall nuklearpower. com experience. Case in point: I just saw an ad for "Rodent Supplies." The obvious question now is, "How do I plug those damn google ad things into Photoshop so I can retire while the comic factory pumps out comedy gold three times a week?"”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=060523

Love, Idea, Question, Time

“Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.”

Thornton Wilder book The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day (1967)

Children

“I missed my slipstick. Dad says that anyone who can't use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty — a K&E 20-inch Log-log Duplex Decitrig. Dad surprised me with it after I mastered a ten-inch polyphase. We ate potato soup that week — but Dad says you should always budget luxuries first. I knew where it was. Home on my desk.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Source: Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), Chapter 7

Beauty, Home

“Well folks, it's October and you know what that means: only a few more weeks 'til Hallowe'en when my family traditionally puts up our Christmas decorations. People come from far and wide to visit our haunted manger. We make their kids stick their hands in a spoooky bowl of Frankincense!! It's actually just spaghetti.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

On The Colbert Report (28 September 2006). Video available at Colbert Nation http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/76103/september-28-2006/the-blitzkrieg-on-grinchitude

People, Family, Christmas

“Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended.
Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.
Various cultures make the transition at various ages, which transition period lasts for varying lengths of time, one accomplishing it in a week with careful dances, ancient prayers, and isolate and specified rituals; another, letting it take its own course, offering no help for it, and allowing it to run on frequently for years. But at the center of the changeover there is a period—whether it be a moment’s vision or a year-long suspicion—where the maturing youth sees all adult behavior as merely formal and totally meaningless.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 114)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Youth, Age, Behavior, Question

“It's genes. My mother looked great at 96. And, you know, I realized that the more you're around, the more that gravity pulls you down. And so I started rubbing up. I wash my face rubbing up, I put my makeup on up and in the shower I rub up — anyplace I can. I'm going to the gym three times a week. That also helps. And it helps to have a good feeling about people. The laugh line is going to be there whether you like it or not, so keep it there — keep it in a laugh line.”

Lee Meriwether (1935) American actress, former model

Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1955: Pageant Is 'Very Special' http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/style-trends/info-01-2013/is-miss-america-still-relevant.html (January 2, 2013)

People, Feeling, Time, Help

“Before it became a winning slogan for Donald Trump, "America First" was a code. On the eve of the worst war the world has ever known, it was Nazi-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh's code for an America which put White Christian Americans of European ancestry before all else. And which pictured Jews – as Trump did just last week by implication – as enemies of America.”

Bradley Burston israeli journalist

Trump's Win, the Greatest Victory for anti-Semitism in America Since 1941 (2016)

War, World

“Already into the last week of October! The dying fall holds only loneliness. In the garden the chrysanthemums bloom, beautiful, peaceful, as they did a year ago, but the autumn leaves, falling one by one, only make me sad.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

Diary entry (October 1974), as quoted in The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Revised and Updated http://books.google.com/books?id=yJZKpYXh2SAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Two+Koreas:+A+Contemporary+History+revised+updated&hl=en&sa=X&ei=X-xvU5TRFPOisQSa34CIBA&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=already%20into%20the%20last%20week&f=false (2001), by Don Oberdorfer, p. 55. 1970s

Sadness, Peace, Beauty, Autumn

“I should have done my novel before this, but I was a journalist and a junkie for 20 years and unlike the junkie cliché, I had good jobs all over the world. I was a books editor, I did financial journalism for Asia Week for five years, I was Bombay correspondent for the South China Morning Post for 18 months, I worked for every newspaper in India doing arts journalism. I was a hardworking junkie.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater

Books, World, Art

“Ba'athism died in Iraq last week. The sight of the oversized bronze head of Saddam rolling in the dust and being beaten with shoes by exuberant Iraqis is perhaps the most important image of Iraqi politics of the last 50 years. It was the end of the republic of fear. Two Iraqis with whom I was camping out in Washington, D. C., woke me up at 5 a. m. that day so we could watch the images of a free Iraq. Tears rolled down our cheeks uncontrollably.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Thank you, America", New York Post (April 15, 2003)

Fear, Shoe, Tear

“Fourteen heart attacks and he had to die in my week. In MY week.”

Janis Joplin (1943–1970) American singer and songwriter

On being shunted off the front page of Newsweek magazine by the late ex-President Dwight D. Eisenhower following his death; New Musical Express interview, (12 April 1969); cited in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

Heart

“After weeks of dancing around the issue, the Obama administration has expressed concern about “heightened military activity” by Russia in Syria. But what if we are facing something more than “heightened military activity?” What if Moscow is preparing to give Syria the full Putin treatment? For years, Russia has been helping Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad cling to a diminishing power structure in a shrinking territorial base without trying to impose an overall strategy. Now, however, there are signs that Russia isn’t content to just support Assad. It wants to control Syria. The Putin treatment is reserved for countries in Russia’s “near neighborhood” that try to break out of Moscow’s orbit and deprive it of strategic assets held for decades. In such cases, unable to restore its past position, Russia tries to create a new situation in which it keeps a sword dangling above the head of the recalcitrant nation. Russia’s military intervenes directly and indirectly, always with help from a segment of the local population concerned. Russia starts by casting itself as protector of an ethnic, linguistic or religious minority that demands its military intervention against a central power vilified with labels such as “fascist” and “terrorist.””

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Putin is turning the Syrian coast into another Crimea http://nypost.com/2015/09/19/putin-is-turning-the-syrian-coast-into-another-crimea/, New York Post (September 19, 2015). New York Post

Support, Past, Help, Dance

“My four years at Berkley represent two of the happiest weeks of my life.”

Michael Medved (1948) American radio host

Source: His talk show (2004-07-09)

Life

“Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

Love, Life, Secret, Age

“"Do the NBC bigheads really pay attention to these message boards?" Um, I don't know if they read the message boards. I hope so, because I write fifty to a thousand fake posts a week, mostly, uh, saying that I'm really good and that no else is as good as me. So, I hope they listen to that because I'm trying to get a raise.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

"Ask Tina" segment from NBC's 30 Rock website

Hope, Reading

“There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander, a comedy about a plot to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia because of his opposition to child labor. You might want to read that sentence twice. The logic: Child labor is necessary to the economic health of the fashion industry, and so its opponents must be eliminated…if the Malaysians made a comedy about the assassination of the president of the United States because of his opposition to slavery, it would seem approximately as funny to us as Zoolander would seem to them.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/zoolander-2001 of Zoolander (28 September 2001) Reviews, One-star reviews

Hate, Health, World, Fashion

“A Frenchman cried and Connelly squatted beside him, took the man's hand, and talked of Ireland. He told the uncomprehending Frenchman of Connaught's beauty, of its women, of fields so fat that a lamb was full grown in a week, of rivers so thick that the fish begged to be caught, and the Frenchman quieted and Connelly patted his hair and told him he was brave, and he was proud of him, and beyond the small grating the sky darkened into dusk and the orderlies came down again and dragged the Frenchman, who had died, head-bumping up the steps.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 184
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Sword (1983)

Women, Beauty, Fish

“Jobs are like going to church: it’s nice once or twice a year to sing along and eat something and all that, but unless you really believe there’s something holy going on, it gets to be a drag going in every single week.”

Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008) Novelist, short story writer, poet

Emancipation: A Romance of the Times to Come (1971)

Singing

“[The Joker is a] psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy. … Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Speaking about playing the Joker, in an interview conducted by Sarah Lyall, during filming of The Dark Knight, in London, as quoted in [Sarah Lyall, Movies: In Stetson or Wig, He's Hard to Pin Down, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04lyal.html, The New York Times, Movies, nytimes.com, Web, November 4, 2007, 2008-08-18]

Thinking, Night

“As females enter the workplace, will our tendency to protect women create rules that will also protect men? Yes and no. Yes, when, for example, the new concern for doctors working fewer than eighty hours per week also affects men. No, when working-class jobs get divided into the males taking the hazardous jobs… and women taking safer jobs. And in professional careers, if males take irregular hours and specialties such as surgery, while females take regular hours and specialties like psychiatry, then we will only reinforce the female-protected class and the male-disposable class.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 213.

Women, Men

“We wrote the first draft in about nine weeks. Nine weeks of gloriously long phone calls, in which we would read each other what we'd written, and try to make the other one laugh. We'd plot, delightedly, and then hurry off the phone, determined to get to the next good bit before the other one could. We'd rewrite each other, footnote each other's pages, sometimes even footnote each other's footnotes.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Good Omens: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book (2014)

Reading

“… I pounded the doors at the local IBM sales office until a salesman took pity on me. After we chatted for a while, he handed me a Fortran [manual]. I'm sure he gave it to me thinking, "I'll never hear from this kid again." I returned the following week saying, "This is really cool. I've read the whole thing and have written a small program. Where can I find a computer?" The fellow, to my delight, found me programming time on an IBM 1130 on weekends and late-evening hours. That was my first programming experience, and I must thank that anonymous IBM salesman for launching my career. Thank you, IBM.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Grady Booch (2003-04-03) in interview "Grady Booch polishes his crystal ball", IBM

Thinking, Time, Reading

“Mark: I have to acknowledge the fact that the Australian Public loves you, they admire your tenacity and they know that you're a great girl. I'm not going to say what I think… What I am going to say is that it's been 3 weeks since we had our producer meeting where you said that you didn't know what type of cd that you wanted to perform…. What kind of record are you going to make?”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 6

Love, Girl, Thinking

“I think he [ Andy Warhol ] would be very interested in the moment that the Dalai Lama appears, being involved in such a kind of idea. Andy has always difficulties with this kind of political activities, because he works in another kind of world, but he is always... Also when he was here [in Germany] last week, he is very interested to hear a lot of new information. He has a kind of observing sense in the back of his mind. So, he is always interested to follow the development, and there is really a kind of imaginative process going on, I think.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1980's, Interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1981, p. 189 - in 'Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama'

World, Imagination, Idea, Thinking

“That’s the saddest loss of all, to go on for a few weeks, a few days, a night, a minute, and think everything is still all right when the structure you’ve built your life on has crumbled. We should have been mourning you, but instead we made plans, went to work, dreamed, loved, not knowing you were already behind us.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

The Bronze Horseman (2001)

Love, Life, Dreams, Thinking

“Are we really here? Is this really happening? Is this America? Are we a great country talking about trying to straddle the world and create opportunity in this country? It's just mind-boggling. And we have sort of become acculturated, because this campaign has been so ugly. We have become acculturated to sleaze and unhappiness that you just want to shower from every 15 minutes. The Trump comparison of the looks of the wives, he does have, over the course of his life, a consistent misogynistic view of women as arm candy, as pieces of meat. It’s a consistent attitude toward women which is the stuff of a diseased adolescent. And so we have seen a bit of that show up again. But if you go back over his past, calling into radio shows bragging about his affairs, talking about his sex life in public, he is childish in his immaturity. And his — even his misogyny is a childish misogyny. And that’s why I do not think Republicans, standard Republicans, can say, yes, I’m going to vote for this guy because he’s our nominee. He’s of a different order than your normal candidate. And this whole week is just another reminder of that… The odd thing about his whole career and his whole language, his whole world view is there is no room for love in it. You get a sense of a man who received no love, can give no love, so his relationship with women, it has no love in it. It’s trophy. And his relationship toward the world is one of competition and beating, and as if he’s going to win by competition what other people get by love. And so you really are seeing someone who just has an odd psychology unleavened by kindness and charity, but where it’s all winners and losers, beating and being beat. And that’s part of the authoritarian personality, but it comes out in his attitude towards women.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

David Brooks, as quoted in "Shields and Brooks on Trump-Cruz wife feud, ISIS terror in Brussels" http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-and-brooks-on-trump-cruz-wife-feud-isis-terror-in-brussels/ (25 March 2016), PBS NewsHour 2010s

Love, Life, Women, People

“England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.”

Philip Roth book The Counterlife

Source: The Counterlife (1986), Ch. 5

Pain, Home

Quotes about week page 6

Quotes about week
page 6