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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Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing.
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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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On Monday I come in and get in a full body workout, and then I come back in on Wednesday and do a quick six, which consists of bench press, biceps and triceps curls, pull downs, something for the back and the neck. And then you come back and hit it again on Friday with a 16-machine workout.
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There's no borders or lines you can't cross anymore. Everything is getting blended with everything. That's the dope thing about music now. Some people don't like it, more of the older people. They want to, you know, go back to old-school New York hip-hop.
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We are in favor of greater free markets.
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With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.
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I've had horror movies thrown at me and I just don't want to do any because violence isn't really good for society.
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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.
