Anthony Daniels Quotes
-
The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.
-
Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.
-
I’m actually quite tired because Threepio is an exhausting character - he’s always very tense, he’s always slightly on the edge of panic. That’s why he’s funny, because he’s always in the wrong place. I record each piece three times in a row, so the director can choose without interrupting too much.
-
If all our political and intellectual elite offers by way of a national culture is "pop music, gambling, fashionable clothes or television," then we can neither mount a convincing intellectual defense against our enemies, nor hope to integrate intelligent, inquiring, and unfulfilled Muslim youths young men principally, of course to our way of life.
-
Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality.
-
Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children.
-
Over the years, I've loved being on stage with an orchestra, waving my hands around.
-
You know, a lot of people are loath to go to an orchestral concert because they are intimidated by the thought.
-
Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result.
-
It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind.
-
The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty. The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.
-
We have people being a little uncomfortable in their life on Earth with finances and so on, so Science Fantasy or Science Fiction allows people to think that there are possibilities beyond the gravity of our planet.
-
The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.
-
Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult.
-
Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one's own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.
-
It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.
-
In a democratic age, only the behavior of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never.
-
I don't do that many appearances at conventions. I like to keep them special for me. And for the fans, I hope.
-
It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow.
-
For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.
-
Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life.
-
I have a greater appreciation for kitchen appliances, having played one.
-
For intellectuals, everyone's mind is closed but their own.
-
All I ever wanted to do was act.