Were Quotes

We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.

The Americans were never interested in what was best for the Shiites.

I never like being touched, ever. People used to say I held my breath when they were hugging me. I still do.

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.

If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.

I never had one beer. If I bought a six-pack of beer, I kept drinking till all six beers were gone. You have to have that kind of understanding about yourself. I haven't had a drink now in 12 years.

Glory follows virtue as if it were its shadow.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.

Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.

I wish we had a system where you are given a bill including service and that people were paid properly so they didn't have to rely on tips. In different restaurants there are different policies and it's all very confusing.

One thing I think is least realistic is that there were five people that made decisions in the fictional 'West Wing.' In real life, there are about five million people that weigh in.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

There weren't a lot of girl singers around. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were the guys I looked up to.

I don't want to wreck my voice. I love to concentrate on playing the bass and keeping it very rock-solid. If I were singing, I would have blown out my voice.

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

I knew I was an unwanted baby when I saw that my bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

All of the muscles were gone, so that was a real tough time of rebuilding all of that. But you have a deadline, you have an obligation. You've said that you will commit to this part, and I just can't live with myself for not really giving it as much as I can.

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that's all.

The Jews were gassed. Armenians were killed in every conceivable way... So the Holocaust doesn't interest me, see? They've had a lot of publicity, but they didn't suffer as much.