Were Quotes

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

There were a lot of people who were a little afraid of the rage or blaming stance I was taking, and find what I am doing now more refreshing.

The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.

We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.

My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that's where a lot of preachers' kids get off base sometimes. Because they don't see the same things at both places.

I don't think I even knew how big we were at the time. It was mad. I gained a lot through East 17 and I'm grateful for being able to have that experience.

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.

I watched a lot of TV, and it clicked one day that these people were acting. It sounded like the most fun thing ever.

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.

I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.

The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor. If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved.

American inventiveness and the desire to build developed because we were guaranteed the right to own our success.

If you were to offer a thirsty man all wisdom, you would not please him more than if you gave him a drink.

I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn't turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

We were always able to sing and blend well together; that's our gift. But aside from that, we're really two different guys.

I was never very interested in boys - and there were plenty of them - vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay.

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

When I started dating I had this kind of Romeo and Juliet, fateful romantic idea about love which was almost that you were a victim and there was a lot of pain involved and that was how it should be.

I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it's a certainty you'll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it's an awful process.

If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, 'You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing', that I think is culpable. I don't know how much more they expect me to be doing, I'd better ask them.

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.