Were Quotes

Yes, in all my research, the greatest leaders looked inward and were able to tell a good story with authenticity and passion.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

My parents were divorced and I would spend weekends with my father.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

The people that were invested in me staying the same way after a decade will most likely by default have to be disappointed.

The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.

You know, if you look back in the 1930s, the money went to infrastructure. The bridges, the municipal buildings, the roads, those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone, started out with a $500 rebate check, remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.

Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.

I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously, and I would, I think, be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity, if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.

Mr. President, you were elected to lead. You chose to follow. And now it's time for you to get out of the way.

I wanted to create jobs and create something that had a very longstanding world-changing effect. We were close. We were close to getting there. It just fell apart.

We weren't put here to be miserable. We were put here to do the best we can, and we should take our energy and improve our state of being.

There'll be moments when I'm out in the prison yard, chatting with the cast and the crew, getting ready to shoot a scene. And then I'll remember if I were actually an inmate, I'd only be out there an hour. The other 23 hours of the day, I'd be in my cell. It's kind of a downer.

Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.

I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.

They think that, if we were just smart enough, we'd be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell 'em, and I do tell 'em, Oh, we're plenty smart, oh yeah - we know what's goin' on. And we don't like what's goin' on. And we're not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

And as a character, what I found very inspiring about playing Dharma, especially at that time, is that the women on television were more neurotic than they were free. And I thought, this is a rare bird and this is unique on television and I think it's really refreshing.

Our two party platforms were emphatic about Jerusalem being the capital of Israel. For the Obama administration to remove this language from the Democratic Party platform drives a wedge into one of the few issues that our two parties agreed on.

When I began making my own albums, the songs became funkier. They were more about the streets.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes or other people's opinions.

I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies.