Then Quotes

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

People find themselves in ruts all the time. You're in a complacent lifestyle where you work 9 to 5 and then you add a mortgage and kids. You feel trapped, but guess what, brother? You constructed that life. If you're OK with it, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you've got unease, then you've got to make a change.

I think of doing a series as very hard work. But then I've talked to coal miners, and that's really hard work.

It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.

I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, 'You can like Mozart and ice hockey...' - and then I used to say 'golf,' but Tiger took over golf! - 'and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.'

It is better to risk starving to death then surrender. If you give up on your dreams, what's left?

People are inevitably disappointed, because no one's as good as Bill Clinton's first impression. Or, he's done things. He's disappointed people in a variety of ways. And so then, the fall is hard.

If we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we choose to keep a tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we've got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship.

I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

I've got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen.

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.

If a leader doesn't convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they'll start to fall down and get depressed.

I was always such a people-watcher. I would sit on street corners alone and watch people and make up stories about them in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I was the one being watched.

If I decide to be an idiot, then I'll be an idiot on my own accord.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

If money titles meant anything, I'd play more tournaments. The only thing that means a lot to me is winning. If I have more wins than anybody else and win more majors than anybody else in the same year, then it's been a good year.

I'm not interested in breaking news. I'm interested in telling the story of what's going on and then trying to figure it out.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

As far as a nuclear weapons-free zone, you know, when the lion lies down with the lamb, and you don't need a new lamb every day to satisfy the lion, then we might have this kind of transformation in the Middle East.

In marriage do thou be wise: prefer the person before money, virtue before beauty, the mind before the body; then thou hast a wife, a friend, a companion, a second self.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn't, then why would you say I am.

As soon as you think you can do whatever you want and you have whatever great professional in the world waiting to work with you, then you are sunk.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

I was emotionally and physically punched in the stomach. This is not a place where you go and deliver the lines and then you come back. It's kind of a life-changing experience. But it can't get better than this for any actor - this is like an opera.