Country Quotes - Page 603

France can compete with the Hollywood studios in terms of animation savoir-faire, but not in terms of box-office figures. France is a small country, and the Americans are the masters of the world - for cinema, it's true.

It's just incredible. When you're French, coming from a non-English language country, you don't even dream about Oscar recognition or nominations. It's just beyond the dream. It's something very, very special and unique. It's the highest recognition any filmmaker could dream of

It's a very American thing that everything has to be a business. Americans think... I like America, or I would not be here. There are great qualities to this country. But this sense that everything has to be a business is sometimes overwhelming.

[I]n my country, when they would say a man has no sense, they say, such an one has no memory; and when I complain of the defect of mine, they do not believe me, and reprove me, as though I accused myself for a fool: not discerning the difference betwixt memory and understanding, which is to make matters still worse for me. But they do me wrong; for experience, rather, daily shows us, on the contrary, that a strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.

Lawyers and physicians are an ill provision for any country.

Life as we know it is fundamentally unsatisfying. I think most folks feel this to be true. They know that a life of aimless consumption isn't much of a life. And work offers us very little satisfaction. Plus our work and consumption is destroying the environment. And this is in the rich countries. Add starvation, etc. to the mix, and you have a lot of people in the world pretty unhappy with things as they are. Modern communications make all of this known to people far and wide, and we see the fundamental unfairness of it all.

Most people in this country, while they might not be happy about things, also are woefully ignorant about many things. Sometimes people can learn, but other times they have to be confronted.

I still believe that workers must be the basic force which must organize and eventually transform society (along with peasants in poor countries). This is because they are the source of the profits which make capitalism what it is. They can shut the system down, and at the same time they possess the unique knowledge needed to make it work in everyone's interests.

Vietnam is no longer a war, it's a country. I think that that's very important to understand. And the Vietnamese - last time a poll was taken, somewhere above 80 percent of Vietnamese people have a very positive outlook towards the United States.

Just a few thousand Hezbollah fighters set two countries on fire all by themselves. Don't discount what bloody mayhem and hell a few thousand armed Druze, Christians, and Sunni can do if they decide to go hunting Shia in revenge for destroying their country.

There is something very consistent about governance in the Arab world. Among the Arab countries today in which there is a modicum of internal stability, each is controlled by an Arafat-type figure - an anti-democratic strongman who is able to crush all challenges to his authority. Likewise, among those Arab countries that aren't ruled by a despot, the political dynamic is also consistent: In Lebanon, Iraq, and now Gaza, sectarian violence is the dominant form of political expression.

Iraq is a strange country. Where else can American civilians like me be protected by terrorist human shields?

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

The Chinese get over 40 percent of their oil from the Middle East through the Persian Gulf, but have you ever seen a Chinese aircraft carrier sitting inside the Persian Gulf? For at least 40 years, the United States of America has been guaranteeing Chinese energy supplies. Sitting here today, the US provides funds to, honest to God, 99 percent of the countries on the planet. We even give North Korea humanitarian aid. We give them food, and God knows what they do with it. They probably feed it to the crooks in the headquarters.

We have a centrist nationalist group of people in this country, lots of them, and we have a socialist group of people in this country, lots of them. And that's not, to me, the American idea.

Why do we take a dollar? Why do we give a dollar to countries that have no rights for women? We have to think about that.

Why do three-quarters of NATO [countries] get away with not paying anything? They have to pay their bills.

The United States should not have to intervene in every single problem around the world. The voters of this country are reacting in a very big, broad way to Mr. Trump. They are frustrated by lousy decisions made by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Look at the mess we have.

Why should we tie everyone's future to athletic success? I think organic farm has saved our school. It saved it because it changed the narrative of the institution. We're the first urban work college in the country. And so our students learn what it means to be effective and to have job skills and work skills.

People think of taxes as money just being robbed from you. They don't consider the benefits of paying taxes. The benefits that they get and also the benefit of just being a part of a large group of people: a town, or a city, or a country, or a society that allegedly should stand together and all try to help each other.

The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.

I think what history will show is that one of the most tragic results of the war in Iraq will be that although Sharon, the Likudites, the Neoconservatives in our country, President Bush and the Democratic party thought the war in Iraq and destroying Saddam would benefit Israeli security, we're seeing absolutely that the war in Iraq has probably put Israeli security in a more tenuous condition than it's been in since the founding of the Israeli state.

Every mujahadeen who comes in from outside the country finds an environment where Arabic is spoken. So in that sense, it's a tremendous come-on for the young in Islam. But I think much more important is, it just validates so much of what the Muslim world is predisposed to believe.

I don't know what our capabilities are. If I were there, I think it would be nutty to do that. The only country on Earth more containable than Iran is Iraq. And we've certainly made a mistake there. We could have continued Saddam.