William Lewis Safir (William Safire) Quotes
You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
Quotes to Explore
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I wasn't a visionary but I literally had my finger on the pulse of the women of America.
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I think I've gotten more confident because the more you do it and the more shows you play, you just feel more confident. You feel more confident about everything.
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Basically, when I went to school in Sri Lanka from age five onward, the classes there were sometimes sorted into a hierarchy of your skin tone. So the fairer-skinned kids sat at the front row, and the darker-skinned kids sat at the back by the poor ones who played out in the street all day long.
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In America, music is more tightly categorized.
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I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.
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Commitment and credibility go hand in hand.
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After all those years in Asia, I don't have to do promotion anymore. We just release a Jackie Chan movie and - Boom! - people go.
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I'm looking for people who are at the cutting edge of what they do, who think out-of-the-box. Even if their work is something common today, it might have been absolutely new when they started out, so we'd like to hear of their beginnings.
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At no point am I ever threatened by people who question who I am, or why I like the things I do, or my legitimacy. Because I know who I am very strongly, and I think that's what geek culture can reinforce.
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Los Angeles can be a really sad city.
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John Sayles is good. He's like a good thoroughbred owner - he leaves the trainers alone.
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A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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There are different sides to me; I wanted to make a personal film but I would not want to make any film that does not reflect me in it. At least, not right now. I'm just too young to be doing that.
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I feared vulnerability more than my actual emotional pain itself!
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I'm annoying to be around because I keep twitching.
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If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
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There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.
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My mom has always been my support system. She taught me to never give up and to keep pursuing my passions no matter what.
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Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.
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I can't sing, but I'll sing over this chord progression, like, over and over, for however long it takes - sometimes it's, like, two minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes - until I've found like a hook or something that I'm really happy with. And then, basically, it just like that's my melody, and that's where I start from.
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Summer School: Never stop learnin' if you want to stop earnin'. I'm reasonably sure there G's in learning and earning.
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Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it's over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment.
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Originally I had a block about appearing in a musical. I went to a voice teacher for a while, but that did no good. My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time. The lyrics are extremely intricate. They move along like a precisely acted scene. If you miss a word - heaven help you - the orchestra rattles past like an express train, and you've got to run like the devil to catch up.
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You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
