Nicholas Lemann Quotes
I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing.
Quotes to Explore
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As I moved to less and less diverse places in my life, I realized that white people don't talk about race amongst themselves!
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We always see abhorrent behavior and say why, but then we get mad when somebody tries to answer.
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In my case, symptoms began to appear when I was only 57. In fact, the doctors believe early-onset Alzheimer's has a strong genetic predictor, and that it may have been progressing for some years before I was diagnosed.
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One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.
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We ended up realizing that's not an economical way to create creatures, putting people in green leotards and figuring it out later. You can maybe do that if you're making 'Avatar,' but we need to know what the creatures look like before we turn on the camera.
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There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States. That's odd.
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For the doubters out there, of course I was going to have help from Penguin's editorial team in telling my story, which I talked about from the beginning.
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I'm not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.
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Enjoy every sandwich.
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We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.
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I get scared easily, so I'm not one for just sitting down with a bowl of popcorn and watching horror stories. But, I mean, I'm learning more. Maybe one day I'd like to be able to watch them.
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I'm rediscovering Scotland; I'm falling in love with it again.
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Young people like to think they're invincible. They don't like to face any situation where they've gotten weaker instead of stronger.
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There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
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Design is the Zeppo Marx of management disciplines - the one that everyone seems to forget.
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And some of what we're doing in Government even now, some of the welfare reform programs that are helping lone mothers come into work are based on things that were very new under the Labour Government in the eighties.
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It's impossible to capture every single facet of someone's personality in a film.
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I don't know anyone at the highest levels who approved Abu Ghraib. If President Barack Obama for a moment thought that somebody at a high level had approved it, he would go after them.
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I was very driven in high school. I worked a bunch of odd jobs. I never partied. I never drank. I was just a theater geek who was obsessed with movies.
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For me, physical beauty is never the reason for attraction to anyone.
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When 'Red Tails' came along, all I knew was that they were the first African-American fighter pilots in the U.S. Air Force. I had no idea how deep the story went or about all their amazing achievements. There were a few Tuskegee Airmen on the set to make sure everything was as authentic as possible.
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I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing.
