I get attached to things: I wear the same jeans for a year.
I'll impose upon you the same arrogance that was imposed on me, and on my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother's mother: all the way back to the first human born of another human being, whether he liked it or not. Probably, if he or she had been allowed to choose, he would have been frightened and answered: No, I don't want to be born. But no one asked their opinion, and so they were born and lived and died after giving birth to another human being who was not asked to choose, and that one did likewise, for millions of years, right down to us.
I interviewed - no - had lunch with Harper Lee several years ago, trying to convince Harper Lee to do "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the book club. She wouldn't do it. She said, "Honey, I said everything I wanted to say."
The average term length of a member of congress is approaching 15 years, and the average term length of a convicted criminal is less than three. We've got that backward.
I have a daughter, she's twenty years old.
Nothing during the year is so impressively convincing as the vision Christmas brings of what this world would be if love became the daily practice of human beings.
I still get a lot of material but I find that as one gets older you get more fussy. You know you're going spend a year or a year and a half on this and you know there are only so many films in you so you get a little bit more selective.
Private sector unionization is down to practically seven percent. Meanwhile the public sector unions have kind of sustained themselves [even] under attack, but in the last few years, there's been a sharp [increase in the] attack on public sector unions, which Barack Obama has participated in, in fact. When you freeze salaries of federal workers, that's equivalent to taxing public sector people.
We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.
I was Tea Party years before there was an official Tea Party.
Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue. Anthropological Commentary The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true.
... Don [Hewitt, 60 Minutes exec producer] told me, "You have set broadcast journalism back 20 years." Naturally, I was both proud and elated although too modest to say so, but broadcast journalism recovered with alacrity, my contract wasn't renewed, and the incident was forgotten.
It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't even read.
South Africans have no concept of time and this is also why we can't solve poverty and social problems… It's now 10 years since the fall of the Apartheid government and we cannot blame Apartheid for being tardy.
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.
Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.
I'm happy with the way I did my career, I wouldn't change it in a million years. I got to do the real grafting and learning from real models when I was younger - how to open up a jacket, walk, and such.
I worked hard in gymnastics since the time I was six years old until I retired at 23 years of age.
[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.
Failure is predictable if you break laws, success is predictable if you obey laws. I discovered and learned that truth when I was 14 years old. Not everyone discovers that. Some people take a lifetime to learn that.
In the Jewish Quarter [Judengasse] was I born and educated; until my fifteenth year, they tried to beat the Talmud into me. My teachers were inhuman beings [Unmenschen], my colleagues were bad company, inducing me to secret sin; my body was frail, my spirit raw.
It's hard to compare. Different times, different players. The administration four years ago did not have 9/11. I could tell you this; this particular administration was better suited to handle that than the former.
I have a roommate, and I signed a year lease. I screwed up! That's like I wrote a joke that didn't work, but now I have to tell it for a year.
Bringing all 45 members of my crazy family together, and watching them argue is super awesome. It's good to do it just once a year.
In general, the bigger a mountain the older it is. The biggest mountains were built before any others, because when they were built there was incomparably more flammable material within the Earth. Over the many thousands of years that have passed, the quantity of flammable material has doubtless decreased.
