878 quotes found
"Oh, you've got a gun? So, you want to pop that?"
"Yo' waddup; this is Snoop D-O-Double-G sayin' stop the violence, drop the guns, and increase the peace."
"What did Snoop Dogg say to a guy carryin' an umbrella? "looks like drizzle ma nizzle""
"Now this No Limit shit, No Limit nigga Everbody wanna know how this shit happens, but we ain't playa hatin' And what's goin' on, but ya know what? It don't get no realer than this though dog."
"I had to shake the spot cause the game got crowded I'm devoted and quote it, I'm rowdy and bout it A No Limit Soldier, and happy to shout it."
"I'm sellin this shit, I ain't tellin this shit, I'm a mutha fuckin 2-time felon ya bitch From the cold hearted streets of the LBC To a mansion in the south down the street from my nigga P See, real niggas recognize the realness Put ya muthafuckin' choppers up if ya feel this."
"So if you got your chrome, you need to stay in the zone And get a vest for your mutha fuckin dome Cause it's on like a dog with out his bone I'm in it to win it and No Limit is my home (for life for life)."
"I'm a gangsta, but y'all knew that Da Big Boss Dogg, yeah I had to do that I keep a blue flag hanging out my backside, only on the left side, yeah that's the Crip side."
"Waitin' on the pizzle, the dizzle and the shizzle G's to the bizzack, now ladies here we gizzo."
"Mr. D, why is you doin' the Big Nasty on my bed?!"
"Sex is like a beautiful meeting of genitalia. It's the dance of love between a penis and vagina."
"When I'm not longer rappin', I want to open up an ice cream parlor and call myself Scoop Dogg."
"So what if I'm smokin' weed onstage and doing what I gotta do? It's not me shooting nobody, stabbing nobody, killing nobody. It's a peaceful gesture and they have to respect that and appreciate that."
"I keep hearing about muthafucking Harry Potter. Who is this muthafucker?"
"If the ride is more fly, you must buy"
"Fuck Bill O'Reilly. He's a muthafucking prick."
"The revolution will be televised."
"Welcome back! If you're wondering where our good friend -- Kevin Eubanks couldn't be here. Kevin is on tour. He's in France right now. He called me today and he's over there and he wouldn't be back until next week. So if you're wondering where Kevin Eubanks is, he's with us in spirit certainly. Okay. Boy, this is the hard part. I want to thank you, the audience. You folks have been just incredibly loyal. (emotionally) This is tricky. (laughs) We wouldn't be on the air without you people. Secondly, this has been the greatest 22 years of my life. (applause) I am the luckiest guy in the world. I got to meet presidents, astronauts, movie stars, it's just been incredible. I got to work with lighting people who made me look better than I really am. I got to work with audio people who made me sound better than I really do. (voice breaking) And I got to work with producers! And writers! (choked pause) And just all kinds of talented people who make me look a lot smarter than I really am. I'll tell you something. First year of this show, I lost my mom. Second year, I lost my dad; then my brother died. And after that, I was pretty much out of family. And the folks here became my family. Consequently, when they went through rough times, I tried to be there for them. The last time we left the show, you might remember we had the 64 children that were born among all our staffers that married. That was a great moment. And when people say to me, hey why don't you go to ABC? Why don't you go to FOX? Why don't you go…? I didn't know anybody over there. These are the only people I have ever known. I'm also proud to say this is a a union show. And I have never worked (applause) -- I have never worked with a more professional group of people in my life. They get paid good money and they do a good job. And when the guys and women on this show would show me the new car they bought or the house up the street here in Burbank that one of the guys got, I felt I played a bigger role in their success as they played in mine. That was just a great feeling. And I'm really excited for Jimmy Fallon. You know, it's fun to kind of be the old guy and sit back here and see where the next generation takes this great institution, and it really is. It's been a great institution for 60 years. I am so glad I got to be a part of it, but it really is time to go, hand it off to the next guy; it really is. And in closing, I want to quote Johnny Carson, who was the greatest guy to ever do this job. And he said, I bid you all a heartfelt good night. Now that I brought the room down, hey, Garth, have you got anything to liven this party up? Give it a shot! Garth Brooks!"
"106 [degrees] in the valley… I was sweating like Dan Rather checking for forged documents."
"I was in the ROTC. Of course, ROTC stood for "Running off to Canada"."
"How many watched the President's speech last night? [half-hearted audience applause] How many watched American Idol? [thundering applause] Okay, there you go! You get the government you deserve."
"So China's president [Hu Jintao] meets, uh— meets America's president. It's like President "Who?" meeting President "Huh?"."
"A new poll shows that Americans now believe that Bill Clinton is more honest than President Bush. […] At least when Clinton screwed the nation, he did it one person at a time."
"And some sad news… the first lesbian couple to legally get married in the state of Massachusetts has split up. They cited irreconcilable similarities."
"Stephen Hawking is getting a divorce. That's scary. If the smartest guy in the world can't figure out women, we're screwed."
"Afterwards, President Bush said, "Maliki is the right man for the job." Just to remind you, Bush also said FEMA's Michael Brown was the right man for the job, Donald Rumsfeld was the right man for the job, Tom DeLay was the right man for the job… which would be okay if Bush was the right man for the job."
"Now, today is the day we honor, of course, the Presidents, ranging from George Washington, who couldn't tell a lie, to George Bush, who couldn't tell the truth, to Bill Clinton, who couldn't tell the difference."
"Women will soon be able to make their own sperm using their own bone marrow. Is that unbelievable? How unfair is that for us guys, huh? I mean, all these years, we've been in charge of manufacturing and distribution, you know what I'm saying? We provide free delivery and installation…"
"No, they said they do not believe in evolution, then they said the biggest threat to America: religious radicals living in the Dark Ages."
"Fred, what happened to your ass?" "Oh, the fat guy at the office sneezed on me."
"I didn't realize it was October until I saw the Chicago Cubs choking."
"How many of you watched the vice presidential debate expecting Sarah Palin to screw up? Be honest. [cheers and applause] : And how many of you watched the debate expecting Joe Biden to screw up? [more cheers and applause] : And how many of you watched the baseball game knowing the Cubs would screw up? [more applause]"
"[about the Chicago Cubs being swept by the L.A. Dodgers in the 2008 NLDS]: How about next year, we only let the Cubs play using steroids?"
"Folks, tomorrow America will get to hear those four words we've been waiting for: "Former president George Bush"."
"Hillary says she has been tested. Well, I hope so. You never know what Bill might bring home."
"And as you know, this whole Hillary e-mail scandal brought Anthony Wiener back into the news. Now here's a question nobody has asked. Anthony Wiener is Jewish, right? Right? So does this scandal make him a Hebrew National Wiener?"
"The economy is so bad, two Milwaukee men were arrested this week for trying to join ISIS. Did you hear their excuse, they said, "Hey! Nobody else is hiring!" THAT'S how bad it is!"
"The economy is so bad, I saw Matthew McConaughey talking to himself in a Kia! THAT'S how bad it is!"
"Well, there's nothing funnier to me than the French. The French Resistance is probably the biggest mythical joke that ever existed. There were four guys in the French Resistance. They couldn't hand over the Jewish people fast enough. Oh, please, don't tell me about the French. The French have all sorts of secret deals with Saddam and everybody else for two cents a liter. It's an easy target."
"French troops arrived in Afghanistan last week, and not a minute too soon. The French are acting as advisers to the Taliban, to teach them how to surrender properly."
""This is now the twelfth day of rioting in France. They have been rioting for almost two weeks. And France has still not surrendered. That's like a record."
"Congratulations to the Italian people for winning the World Cup. … They won after France’s best player got ejected for head butting. That’s the closest anyone in a French uniform has come to combat in 60 years"
"In America, we like everyone to know about the good work we're doing anonymously."
"Racecar driving is a lot like sex; all men think they're good at it."
"There were just things in Disney movies that probably were too scary for kids."
"There were nude pictures... a lot of it is erotic or sexual. But I don't view my collection as dirty in any way. I view it as art."
"Does anyone come back from this? I don't know the answer to that, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let this destroy me."
"Please accept my apology for not going public with what I've been facing the last six years. I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you."
"Socializing on the internet is to socializing, what reality TV is to reality."
"Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand."
"Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama? That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I would use is, if you're driving in your car and you're listening to a rock 'n' roll station on the radio and a song comes on, and in the song you hear elements of jazz and folk and you hear strings in there … it's not necessary to answer the question, "Is this jazz, is this folk, or is this rock?" before you decide to listen to it and like it or not."
"People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn."
"I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. " You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?" and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like."
"The worst crime you can commit is telling the audience something they already know, in any fashion, even for a moment."
"The problem I had when I wrote The Social Network was that this thing that’s supposed to bring us closer together is pushing us further apart. It gives everyone the impression that everyone else in the world is having a better time, and that if you are not cataloging your life, then you’re not really living it. People are going to show you only pictures of themselves having a great time at the best party with the coolest people eating, for some reason, avocado toast. They’re also not going to experience empathy. When we’re a little kid on a playground and say something mean to another little kid, we see in their face what we did, and we feel bad because of it. On social media, it’s more like yelling at another driver from your car. People are developing a chemical addiction to their phones. A gambling addict feels that rush of dopamine and serotonin not when they win but when the roulette wheel is spinning. When kids stick their hand in their pocket to get their phone and see if someone has commented on the photo they posted, they get that rush of serotonin and dopamine. It’s a big deal. And now, when we talk about our concerns with Facebook, we’re talking about the power that it has to disseminate misinformation and disinformation. We’re never going to put this genie back in the bottle, but surely we can decide that lies are bad."
"Decisions are made by those who show up."
"I know this in no way alleviates the enormous amounts of pain and loss experienced by those who have suffered from the tsunami, but I hope it can make a difference."
"Women should do a lot more fighting. I don't think it's fair that we can't get into a good bar fight once in a while. We'd get out a lot of stuff we're supposed to repress."
"Beginnings are usually scary and endings are usually sad, but it’s the middle that counts. You have to remember this when you find yourself at the beginning."
"Sandra Bullock on 'Gravity' Oscar Nom: 'I've Just Gotten Better at Not Picking Crap'"
"I like to iron. Ironing is comfort. It's control. I'm a nutty person who likes to make sure everything is in its place. I am a big ball of high energy and organization and structure. Don't forget, I'm half-German."
"I know I'm not easy to deal with. I'm controlling, and I want everything orderly, and I need lists. My mind goes a mile a minute. I'm difficult on every single level. I'm aware that I can be annoying."
"I now know that anything sweet, really sweet, that I have was nothing that I planned. If you don't have kids and animals, you don't truly know what real life is about."
"I never did anything according to what anyone else wanted. That's why I think I am happy. I do everything 100% — even my stupidest missteps. I know when I'm getting ready to mess up, I'm going to do it full-on."
"I have to fight every single day to live my true life. I don't ever want to come home saying, "I should have spoken my mind. I shouldn't have let someone say something that I didn't feel was right." … [But] I have to remember that there's a balance. I'm in the entertainment business. We're here to entertain people, to make them laugh and forget."
"Therapy is washing of the brain. You’re willing to get a facial. Wash the brain. Take it out, clean it. What doesn’t belong there, throw it away."
"Human beings exist that have integrity, that know how to keep their mouth shut, that know the bigger picture, that don’t sell out their friends."
"“Free is the best. Anything free is good.”"
"“What do I want to say to little girls that I know? Don’t change. Be who you are.”"
"“Once you’re a parent, you can’t see through different eyes other than that of a parent,”"
"Does age matter? Time does“Once you’re a parent, you can’t see through different eyes other than that of a parent."
"“There’s no race, no religion, no class system, no color – nothing – no sexual orientation, that makes us better than anyone else. We’re all deserving of love.”"
"I've learned that success comes in a very prickly package. Whether you choose to accept it or not is up to you. It's what you choose to do with it, the people you choose to surround yourself with. Always choose people that are better than you. Always choose people that challenge yout and are smarter than you. Always be the student. Once you find yourself to be the teacher, you've lost it."
"Women are like ovens. We need 5 to 15 minutes to heat up."
"At this critical time, I am grateful to Sandra Bullock for once again demonstrating her leadership, compassion and belief in our global humanitarian mission. Sandra continues to enable our lifesaving work and is a model for personal generosity."
"Most liberal-minded folk would like to think that since they are not hostile to people of a different race, racism is a disease of the uneducated, unenlightened and socially backward - football hooligans, British National Party supporters, policemen. You could call this the Bad Guy Theory. But the Bad Guy Theory does not explain why Indian-heritage children do nearly twice as well as Pakistani-heritage children at GCSE. If the difference were simply a matter of teacher attitudes you would have to believe that most British teachers were bigoted — and that their prejudice was directed solely at the Pakistani pupils and never at their Indian classmates. Both suggestions defy common sense."
"For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better."
"There's no suggestion that Lord Mandelson has done anything unlawful. But I would claim the friend's privilege to tell Peter that he has been, at best naive and foolish, at worst greedy and duplicitous. Whatever is true as far as politics and public office are concerned, for Peter Mandelson, this is the end."
"The question now is whether the price of his misjudgement is to be paid only by the man himself, or whether those who trusted him and elevated him to the peerage, and to one of the highest diplomatic posts available, should also share in his ignominy."
"Earlier last year, following the spate of statues being toppled as part of the Black Lives Matter protests, a protester a long way from Minneapolis – in Broadstairs, Kent – sprayed the words "Dickens Was A Racist" on the Dickens House Museum. The protester was called Ian Driver and he was prompted by a letter that Dickens had written decrying the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Unquestionably, the letter is racist. However, it is strange that Driver had to go all the way to a relatively obscure piece of correspondence by Dickens to become inflamed by his racism, when, in Oliver Twist, in plain sight, and widely known to us for many, many years, has been Fagin. But maybe he doesn't count."
"It's revealing [...] Because the obvious thing to say is not that the documentary demonizes Hamas - it simply shows Hamas, through their own audio and footage - but that the documentary makes uncomfortable viewing for those who wish to believe that Hamas represents the Palestinians, both their suffering and their political purpose, rather than being inspired by Jew-hatred and violcence [sic]."
"[A]ction restarting action: all we need to reverse inertia is some sense of consequence - some sense that beyond this occurrence there is another, and that they are linked, some sense that life has chapters."
"[H]e felt frustrated, his sense of fate and direction subverted by banalities - the frustration of the man who, having thought himself following his destiny, finds he is actually on the A318 to New Malden."
"That's the thing about your destiny: how are you supposed to know it when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from the random life?"
"Mel [Gibson] will always be Mad Max, and me, I will always be a number."
"The village is a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is Number Six and will live there happily as Number Six for ever after. [...] And this is the one rebel that they can't break."
"When they did finally see it, there was a near-riot and I was going to be lynched. And I had to go into hiding in the mountains for two weeks, until things calmed down. That's really true!"
"Nothing—believe me—nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death."
"We're told that they were zealots fueled by religious fervour…religious fervour and if you live to be a thousand years old will that make any sense to you? Will that make any goddamn sense?"
"What is this, Vassar?!"
"In My Pants!"
"I may not be smart enough to debate you point-for-point on this, but I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap."
"Now all of us can talk to the NSA—just by dialing any number."
"Hey, John, I got a question! You need a ride to the airport?"
"Nice job…what the hell is U2 supposed to play?"
"How long have you been a black man?"
"Mia Hamm: So we walk in to the sorority house and they're (their families and friends) just ripped. I mean they're going nuts. David Letterman: Wow I like the sound of this already; the female soccer team in the sorority house. Noow we're gettin' somewhere."
"David Letterman: Earlier today, the man who owns this network, Leslie Moonves—he and I have had a relationship for years and years and years—and we have had this conversation in the past, and we agreed that we would work together on this circumstance and the timing of this circumstance. And I phoned him just before the program, and I said, "Leslie, it's been great, you've been great, the network has been great, but I'm retiring." Paul Shaffer: This is—really? David Letterman: Yep. Paul Shaffer: This is—this is—you actually did this? David Letterman: Yes, I did. [dead silence in the studio followed by nervous laughter from the audience] Paul Shaffer: Well—do I have a minute to call my accountant, because…I, uh… [Dave cracks up] David Letterman: I just want to reiterate my thanks for the support from the network, all of the people who have worked here, all of the people in the theatre, all the people on the staff, everybody at home. Thank you very much. And what this means now, is that Paul and I can be married. [uproarious laughter and applause as wedding chimes play] David Letterman: So we don't have the timing of this precisely down, I think it will be at least a year or so. But sometime in the not too distant future—2015 for the love of God, in fact, Paul and I will be wrapping things up and taking a hike. [studio audience goes wild, gives him a standing ovation] David Letterman: Thank you, thanks everybody. All right, thanks very much."
"All right, that's pretty much all I got. The only thing I have left to do, for the last time on a television program: Thank you and good night."
"It's interesting about life. You learn things over that you already learned. And then you forget, because you're drawn to the mundane so you can't be sucked into the reality, the drama, and the ugliness that can be provided by life. So, you're drawn toward the mundane."
"Don't confuse cancellation with failure. Although this is also a failure."
"You know why I fear people’s judgment? Because I know they’re judging. I know they are."
"I know when I walk into that classroom in the morning, even if it’s for a split second, at some point I’m being checked out."
"I’m not classically trained. I didn’t come from the fancy home, no."
"Everyone can commit to 20 minutes, especially if there’s a glass of Chardonnay afterwards."
"This is going to sound really weird, but I never had a desire to be famous. I never had huge ambitions — never."
"I often look at women who wear great jeans and high heels and nice little T-shirts wandering around the city and I think, I should make more of an effort. I should look like that. But then I think, They can’t be happy in those heels."
"I need to be looked after. I’m not talking about diamond rings and nice restaurants and fancy stuff—in fact, that makes me uncomfortable. I didn’t grow up with it and it’s not me, you know. But I need someone to say to me, ‘Shall I run you a bath?’ or ‘Let’s go to the pub, just us.’"
"I don’t particularly remember sitting at home crying and eating endless packets of HobNobs. I don’t remember doing that at all. Honestly, I think it was a stress thing or something. I don’t know."
"I do think it’s important for young women to know that magazine covers are retouched. People don’t really look like that. In films I might look glamorous, but I’ve been in hair and make-up for two hours."
"Even now I do not consider myself to be some kind of great, sexy beauty. I don’t mind the way I’m ageing. No reason to panic just yet. I think I look my age, and that’s fine. The lord God almighty has done me proud with my features which I'm proud of and have no desire to alter them. I say " let nature take its course "."
"I don't look like that and I don't desire to look like that."
"It's a funny time to be nominated for things and accepting prizes when people as great as him have left us. But I don't want to leave you on a sad note, so I'm going to tell a funny story about Al if I can. When I worked with him when I was only 19 years old, I was absolutely terrified on day one, and I remember him looking at me, and I remember feeling so small, smaller than I'd ever felt before in my life. And after a few weeks of getting to know him and realizing just how wonderful and warm he really was, I was standing there in my costume on Sense and Sensibility, and my knickers had gone up my bum. And, you know, when you're trying to flit your knickers out of your arse and you're wearing a corset, it's actually quite tricky. And so I was sort of yanking at my pants, and Emma Thompson was standing right there, and I said, 'fuck, my fucking knickers have gone up my arse!' And Al just said, 'ah... feminine mystique strikes again.'"
"She's a very gentle and grounded person, so I suppose I could say that I'm not worried about her. She knows the industry extremely well. She has a really wonderful family, too. Yeah, of course we talked about it. Of course we do. It's a great privilege to be able to share the experiences I have had with her. Am I going to be specific about what we shared? No [laughs]. But she's going to be just fine. She's a really great human being. She's going to be tremendous actually."
"I first auditioned Kate Winslet when she was 17. I thought she was 25. Such was her self-possession, presence and concentration...later, I cast her as Ophelia in a film of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I did not ask her to audition...She listened with superhuman acuity, and expressed character with effortless depth... (now) those same qualities are radiant, having now evolved into a truly awesome acting technique. Only now, hers is the art that entirely hides the artist...It’s magnificent to watch."
"It's not like I let people do things for me, so I guess you can call me a control freak, or you can call me passionate... I'm not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination."
"Between us, if I'm offered a job at Fox News, I'll take it. Instantly. I will send my children to go to America after highschool, I will pay for them to go, to exchange the Arab nightmare for the American dream."
"Khader: "No. They can’t help it, because they don’t agree with the justification for the war — WMD, ‘Saddam Hussein represents a danger for the whole international community, he has ties with al Qaeda,’ etc. Nobody believes in that." Interviewer: "But they agreed with the result, in the sense that they wanted him deposed." Khader: "Yes, but they would have preferred that the result should have come from within Iraq.""
"As long as we reported on Iraqi casualties the Americans were quiet. But when we showed American prisoners and the dead, U.S. authorities went crazy. They were trying to show their people that this is a clean war. When we showed American prisoners, they said Al Jazeera is violating the Geneva Convention. That’s just not true. But when they showed the dead bodies of the sons of Saddam, they said that was all right because how else are the Iraqi people going to know that the danger has ended."
"If the West is genuinely interested in democracy then they will have to suffer hundreds of Al Jazeeras. There is Abu Dhabi television, Al-Arabiya (but that is under Saudi patronage), and there is a channel out of Lebanon (but they are politically close to Hezbollah). They are all very good as journalists but they are all part of the state."
"The Internet is an American creation and it is now being used by an enemy of America. I would like to ask someone at the FBI why are they not able to catch Al Qaeda when they upload a message?"
"… Any one of a million things could fail and cause our complex civilization to collapse for an hour, for a day, or however long. That's when you find out the extent to which you are reliant on technology and don't even know it. That's when you see that it's so interdependent, that if you take one thing away, the whole thing falls down and leaves you with nothing."
"These are the great ancient temples of Karnak, on the edge of the Nile about 450 miles south of Cairo. They were the center of Egyptian religion, built in the imperial city of Thebes, when the Egyptian empire was at its height, the greatest power in the world. This was the New York of its time. The temples were built over a period of 2,000 years, each pharaoh adding his bit, leaving his name in stone, to last forever. Inside the temple domain, there were 65 towns, 433 gardens & orchards, 400,000 animals, and it took 80,000 people just to run the place. Small wonder that centuries afterwards the Greeks and Romans came here and gawked like peasants at a civilisation that made their efforts look like well-dressed mud huts. It still has that effect today. You come here from the great modern cities, full of the immense power of modern technology at your finger tips, press a button, turn a switch. And this place... stops you dead."
"The Egyptians built an empire and ran it with a handful of technology... the wheel, irrigation canals, the loom, the calendar, pen & ink, some cutting tools, some simple metallurgy, and the plough, the invention that triggered it all off. And yet look how complex and sophisticated their civilisation was. And how soon it happened, after that first man-made harvest. The Egyptian plough and those of the few other civilisations sprang up around the world at the same time... Gave us control over nature... And at the same time, tied us for good, to the things that we invent so that tomorrow will be better than today. The Egyptians knew that. That's why they had gods. To make sure that their systems didn't fail."
"Karnak was the first great statement of what technology could do with unlimited manpower and the approval of the gods. Ironically, the modern equivalent lies, again, in the desert. This time, the nomads also settled by a river... a river of oil. But what took the pharaohs 4,000 years to build took the Kuwaitis 4,000 days. What's happened in Kuwait, the change from a nomadic existence to being able to buy and use everything modern technology has to offer has come in much less than one generation. Kuwait represents the immense power of technology used in a way most of us have never experienced, because we've lived with the kind of change it can bring for more than a hundred years. Here it's been focused. Change has been instant and total. Kuwait has suddenly become like New York, or any other of the great urban islands on technology, totally dependent on that technology. Like them, without it, Kuwait would return to the desert."
"You see how increasingly the only way we in the advanced industrial nations, with our bewildering technology network, can survive, is by selling bewilderment and dependence on technology to the rest of the world. Or is it not bewilderment and dependence, but a healthier wealthier better way of living than the old way? And, yet, whether or not you dress up technology to look local, the technology network is the same. And as it spreads, will it spread the ability to use machines, as we do, without understanding them?"
"An invention acts rather like a trigger, because, once it's there, it changes the way things are, and that change stimulates the production of another invention, which in turn, causes change, and so on. Why those inventions happened, between 6,000 years ago and now, where they happened and when they happened, is a fascinating blend of accident, genius, craftsmanship, geography, religion, war, money, ambition... Above all, at some point, everybody is involved in the business of change, not just the so-called "great men." Given what they knew at the time, and a moderate amount of what's up here [pointing to head], I hope to show you that you or I could have done just what they did, or come close to it, because at no time did an invention come out of thin air into somebody's head, [snaps fingers] like that. You just had to put a number of bits and pieces, that were already there, together in the right way."
"Following the trail of events from some point in the past to a piece of modern technology is rather like a detective story, with you as the detective, knowing only as much as the people in the past do, and like them having to guess at what was likely to happen next."
"I would say it was a pretty safe bet, that the one magic wish most people would like to be granted would be to be able to see into the future. Think what it would mean. And backing the right horse! But we can't. We have to guess about tomorrow and we have to act on that guess, and it's never been any different. And that's why following the trail from the past up to the emergence of the modern technology that surrounds us in our daily lives, and affects our lives, is rather like a detective story. Because, at no time in the past, did anybody have anything to do with the business of inventing or changing things, ever know what the full effect of his actions would be. He just went ahead and did what he did for his own reasons, like we do. That's how change comes about. And it's like a detective story because if you follow the trail from the past up to a modern man-made object, the story is full of sudden twists and false clues and guesswork, and you never know where the story is heading until the very last minute."
"Today, the nuclear bomb is like a Sword of Damocles hanging over us. Will it fall again?"
"Television tells us everyday that we live in a world we don't understand. And yet in the main it does little to explain that world. It tells us of new products that make the products we have either old-fashioned or obsolete. Above all, if today we are aware of how fast the world around us is changing, it's because television acts as a relentless reminder of that fact."
"Does the cycle that goes, interest in something, involvement in it, tiring of it, and rejection of it, looking into something else, get shorter every decade?"
"Edison invented inventing."
"If you believe that science and technology have given us the highest standard of living in history or that they have trapped us inside of a machine we can't escape from, we live in a situation we inherited, as a result of a long and complex series of events through history. At no time in the past could anybody have known that what they were doing then would end up like this now."
"You can only know where you're going if you know where you've been."
"This bomber stands for the interdependent world we have made for ourselves; where the rate of change accelerates every second because every one of man's inventions acts like a trigger to cause change."
"The question is in what way are the triggers around us likely to operate to cause things to change -- for better or worse. And, is there anything we can learn from the way that happened before, so we can teach ourselves to look for and recognize the signs of change? The trouble is, that's not easy when you have been taught as I was, for example, that things in the past happened in straight-forward lines. I mean, take one oversimple example of what I'm talking about: the idea of putting the past into packaged units -- subjects, like agriculture. The minute you look at this apparently clear-cut view of things, you see the holes. I mean, look at the tractor. Oh sure, it worked in the fields, but is it a part of the history of agriculture or a dozen other things? The steam engine, the electric spark, petroleum development, rubber technology. It's a countrified car. And, the fertilizer that follows; it doesn't follow! That came from as much as anything else from a fellow trying to make artificial diamonds. And here's another old favorite: Eureka! Great Inventors You know, the lonely genius in the garage with a lightbulb that goes ping in his head. Well, if you've seen anything of this series, you'll know what a wrong approach to things that is. None of these guys did anything by themselves; they borrowed from other people's work. And how can you say when a golden age of anything started and stopped? The age of steam certainly wasn't started by James Watt; nor did the fellow whose engine he was trying to repair -- Newcomen, nor did his predecessor Savorey, nor did his predecessor Papert. And Papert was only doing what he was doing because they had trouble draining the mines. You see what I'm trying to say? This makes you think in straight lines. And if today doesn't happen in straight lines -- think of your own experience -- why should the past have? That's part of what this series has tried to show: that the past zig-zagged along -- just like the present does -- with nobody knowing what's coming next. Only we do it more complicatedly, and it's because our lives are that much more complex than theirs were that it's worth bothering about the past. Because if you don't know how you got somewhere, you don't know where you are. And we are at the end of a journey -- the journey from the past."
"Never before have so many people understood so little about so much."
"So, in the end, have we learned anything from this look at why the world turned out the way it is, that's of any use to us in our future? Something, I think. That the key to why things change is the key to everything. How easy is it for knowledge to spread? And that, in the past, the people who made change happen, were the people who had that knowledge, whether they were craftsmen, or kings. Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who are the true driving force of humanity. And before you say what about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos? Let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently: that at best, the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Second hand views of the world, made third hand by your interpretation of them. Things like that [art book] as opposed to this [transparency of some filaments]. Know what it is? It's a bunch of amino acids, the stuff that goes to build up a worm, or a geranium, or you. This stuff [art book] is easier to take, isn't it? Understandable. Got people in it. This, [transparency] scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology, and leaves only what is demonstrably true about the world. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology they have begun to know that they don't know so much. And that, if they are to have more say in what happens to their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge, that they know exists, and that they don't possess. And by helped towards that knowledge I don't mean give everybody a computer and say: help yourself. Where would you even start? No, I mean trying to find ways to translate the knowledge. To teach us to ask the right questions. See, we're on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that’s not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don't have access to it, as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb and blind. And I don't think most people want that. So, what do we do about it? I don't know. But maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything. Because that ability is there, as long as it is explained clearly enough. And then go and ask for explanations. And if you're thinking, right now, what do I ask for? Ask yourself, if there is anything in your life that you want changed. That's where to start."
"We expect to learn new tricks because one of our science based abilities is being able to predict. That after all is what science is about. Learning enough about how a thing works so you'll know what comes next. Because as we all know everything obeys the universal laws, all you need is to understand the laws."
"Copernicus published his manuscript in 1543 just in time for the council of Trent. So you're a church father and what this new system of Copernicus is saying is this: The Earth moves, although the Bible says it doesn't. It's no longer at the center of God's universe, although the Bible says it is. It's a planet, so heaven and Earth are no longer separate. And Aristotle was wrong, although church authority depends on his being right. You're a church father and you pick up this subversive, heretical, revolutionary piece of lunacy and you start foaming at the mouth, right? Wrong. When the council finally got around to reading Copernicus they were delighted. His new system had made calendar reform more precise. And the business of it turning every basic belief about the universe on its head? A mere fairytale since from the church's viewpoint he was talking nonsense. Astronomy drew lines and circles in the sky but they weren't really there, they're a mathematical convenience for measuring or teaching astronomy. While the Copernicus system might well have been brilliant mathematics, no one thought for a minute that he was actually suggesting the earth was whizzing around the sun. That kind of talk would blow holes in everything."
"Take movement for example. Forces acting up, down, or from side to side. You make theories to explain it all, but you might well remember that it was you that invented them all. For Mach there was no reason to believe the rest of the cosmos was doing what your little bit was doing, so science should only describe not try to explain. Even description is relative. Am I moving or is the back ground? Or take the position of a star. It depends on the position you see it from, which depends on the date and time, which in turn depends on the position of the earth, in a solar orbit, in a solar system, moving around the edge of a Galaxy which may be moving away from other Galaxies. Say that you've decided that I'm moving and the background is standing still. Is the background moving relative to something else?"
"Einstein's theory was that everything about the laws of the universe and nature was relative. What you observe about something depends greatly upon your frame of reference at the time. That's why I can stand here in this Concorde [jetliner]cabin and drop my pen in comfort. In here I'm not traveling 1,400mph, am I? Everything works like that. Conditioned by its frame of reference. All the electronics in all the instruments in this cockpit obey the exact same laws they would if the plane were standing still. Because in this frame, like me they are not traveling at Mach two. And all the laws of nature behave the same way. This beam of light is going out in all directions at 186,000 miles per second. Being on the concord makes no difference to it's speed going forward, backwards sideways."
"When any good attitude or concept or system worked well, we hung onto it. We preserved representative democracy, intended for a time when only a few could get to the capital to speak for the many. Modern finance was designed in the 17th century. Literacy as a test of intelligence came in the 15th century. The idea of progress is 19th century. And yet, all of those things are part of our mental furniture today, because when the answer to a question -- a solution to a problem -- suits us, we kind of institutionalize it, so that it won't change even when we do. The business of questioning, itself, has been institutionalized like that, in the kind of place that Jodrell Bank telescope belongs to: a university."
"The oldest answers to the most basic questions about how to operate are common to virtually every culture on the planet, because at the simplest level, every culture needs to keep order -- especially this kind: (James Burke displays a wedding ring.) This is one of those things in life we protect most against being changed when knowledge changes us. We protect it by turning it into a ritual. When we get married, or buried, get christened, or anything else too important to play by ear, the event is turned into a kind of play where everybody gets a role they act out. It's a kind of public agreement to stick to the general rules about whatever it is. The people doing it are effectively saying, "No matter what else may change, we won't rock the boat! We're not maverick. You can trust us." Expressions of approval follow. Most of these ritual ways of answering a social need that we got from the past look like it. They include something from an ancient rite -- in this case, the old symbol of fertility: the ring. And then, it's all done in the presence of a supernatural being: a God. So, the agreement is also made under what was once a real threat of heavenly retribution if you broke your promise later on. Some things, this ritual says, must be permanent."
"A ritual wouldn't be much of a ritual if you didn't feel like you've been put through the wringer, would it?"
"If something becomes common enough to turn into a ritual, and then starts to involve really large numbers of people, that's when the ritual becomes something else. It becomes widespread enough to affect the general agreement we all share. So, that's when the responsibility for running it goes out of your hands to be taken over by the institutions set up to run the rituals that matter on a regular basis, so that people can have clear rules and regulations to follow if they decide to get up to that particular ritual. The institutions take the admin out of daily life and run it for you: banking, government, sewage, tax collecting. Or, if you break the rules and regulations, one institution can take you out of daily life. This one: (James Burke displays a trial.) In every community, the law -- whether it's dressed up like this or the village elders telling you what the local custom is -- the law is all those rules I was on about earlier. I suppose what institutions like this do, most of all, is the dirty work. While they're putting them away here in the law court, for instance, that leaves us free to get on with making money, having a career, and avoiding the social responsibilities that these people have to deal with. And after a few centuries of this buck-passing, the institutions get big and powerful, and reach into everybody's lives so much they become hard to alter and virtually impossible to get rid of."
"The name of the game here, and in all the institutions that run your life, is keeping order, because if the institutions didn't do that, it would be the end of civilization as we know it, wouldn't it? So, the institutions are usually old-fashioned; don't like change."
"Closing monologue"
"… That's all it takes to get you back to the late 18th century. Three grandfather's lifetimes. That's how close we are to it. And, yet, that world has disappeared so totally, it's like fairyland. Thatched cottages, meadows, happy peasants. A golden age. Garbage, all that. Nasty, brutish, and short - that's what life was all about. And dirty. And boring. And it had been like that for thousands of years! And then, suddenly, the whole complex polluted overpopulated phrenetic nonstop stressful high tech rat race that is the modern world... Life was suddenly no longer as simple as it had been. And the extraordinary thing is, none of that was planned."
"I've always been an actor. That's my job — I can be anything you want me to be."
"For so long, I didn't play the object of attention or affection. It wasn't until L.A. Story that anyone cast me in a role that had my sexuality as a point of interest or focus or operation. I just wasn't examined in the same way that a 'pretty girl' would be."
"I didn't think I was going to be a person who other people knew, whose name was recognizable."
"Anything having to do with food is pleasurable for me. Any conversation about food, review of food, story of food, picture of food, thought of food..."
"Just because people don't have money doesn't mean they don't desire the same thing. They should have it, and it should be good."
"I strangely feel better before I go through hair and makeup. Maybe that's just because I feel like me."
"It never grows old, putting on a beautiful dress. For me, it's a great distraction. It's always ridiculous, and it always feels like it should be happening to somebody else."
"My instinct was that it felt personal. It was really about 'We don't like her.' Who were the judges and critics? I would like to ask them, 'What exactly is it that you personally find not sexy about me? Is it my figure? Is it my brain that bothers you?'"
"That's the beauty of this country — we can have different opinions and coexist and be amused by each other and hurt and offended."
"I have a history, a long history of being stereotyped as a five-foot-two woman, which is very limiting. I've worked so hard to create characters that have dignity. And I think everybody knows that I have a very pro-woman message in my work — and in my life."
"I have to be honest with you. Comedy is what I want to see at the movies these days. Life is frickin' hard, man. I want to go to the movies and see people happy and enjoying themselves and having some fun. I've made other kinds of movies, for sure. But it's pretty apparent to me that's what people want. That's what I want. I enjoy those kinds of movies."
"I have a good memory for certain things. And a very short memory for painful things — that's my favorite Martha Stewart quote, by the way."
"You know, I used to not understand fashion, a lot of it, but I completely understood being a playwright or a screenwriter and suddenly having an actor say your words and making them come to life. That I can understand. Finally, I'm starting to understand this."
"I'm always endlessly surprised about the people who come into my life, who I get to collaborate with. I feel really overwhelmed by those opportunities. But it's not like I fell off the turnip truck and suddenly became who I am. I really have worked hard for it, and I have to acknowledge that. I care about what I do, and I have a sense of pride in my work. And you can never be totally settled as an actor or artist or musician. You have to keep the fire under you, because that's what makes you better."
"You spend months and months listening to the music, absorbing, practicing, working with real musicians who worked with them and getting as much of that as you can. And then the day you start shooting, you have to throw it all away. Because, they had no self-consciousness. They were natural performers and at that time, it wasn't about how you could synthesize a voice and make it appealing, it was about the natural little hiccups and the way you related a story or wrote the soul in the words you wrote. And 90% of your popularity was your performance and your interpretation of your own song. So, once we learned it all you just have to just kind of hope it all sunk in somewhere and just let it all go, cause they just had incredible confidence."
"Hello, I'm Charlie Brooker and you're watching Screenwipe, a programme all about television."
"Well, babies are notoriously foul-mouthed. [shot of Charlie pointing at a doll] This one just called Derek a prick!"
"Oh good, this is hardly ever on."
"So whose side is it on, is it on Anthea's side or is it on human kind side? Well the answer is it's on nobody's side but its own; it's a TV program, it's just gonna sneer at everyone because that's what TV programs do they sneer and sometimes they just roll around slapping their bums! (rolls about pointing his buttocks at the camera and slapping them whilst grunting "Nuh, nuh!") On the sofa, because they're so bloody, fucking pleased with themselves."
"Balls to aspiration, it's a tosser's mirage."
"Now, as an embittered cynic, I should be almost programmed to vomit all over the screen at the mere sight of this, but instead, I find it strangely moving. You see, as I stare into their happy smiling faces filled with naive joie de vivre, I know they're just blissfully unaware of the crushing despair that awaits them as they venture further into adulthood. The myriad disappointments, the yawning chasms of pain, the slow gnawing descent into physical decay, the sheer unrelenting horror of it all."
"At first glance, My Super Sweet 16 appears to be a sugary bit of reality drizzle about some irritating American brats, but the more you watch it the more you realize it’s actually a stonehearted exposé of everything that’s wrong with our faltering so-called civilization."
"Each episode follows an unbelievably spoiled rich and tiny sod as they prepare to throw a despicably opulent coming of age party for themselves and their squealing shitcake friends."
"Actually, I think this might be an Al-Qaeda recruitment film."
"Fortunately for whining snotface, the party itself goes with a bang. She enters looking every inch the cosseted flesh-waste she is, and her and her nauseating idiot scumbag friends celebrate into the night: dancing, shrieking, acting like pillocks, and generally making you feel like getting down on your knees and praying for a nuclear holocaust."
"In summary, our world is doomed."
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells."
"That's certainly made me think - it's made me think, "I don't know if I want a television any more.""
"...the news might be single-handedly trying to bring about an environmental catastrophe, which it will then report on."
"Super injunctions are interesting legal weapons really, they don't just gag the press, they gag them from mentioning the existence of the gag."
"Sport belongs in a news bulletin about as much as a mummified cat's head belongs in a Caesar salad."
"Combine the "mounting pressure" with the "growing cause" and you've got yourself a "media whirlwind" which you can also refer to."
"...I haven't seen so many dirty snouts, and slimy arseholes crammed into such a small space since I last looked inside a sausage."
"Newspapers chiefly exist to spooned the opinions of their readers back to them, much like an arse to mouth hosepipe."
"One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email me asking for advice on how to break into writing, presumably figuring that if a drooling gum-brain like me can scrape a living witlessly pawing at a keyboard, there's hope for anyone."
"The original cut of Ridley Scott's recent retelling of the Robin Hood legend contained a puzzling interlude during which Russell Crowe recited the URL for a pornographic website. The scene was dropped from the theatrical release at the last minute when it was discovered that a script supervisor had inadvertently pasted the contents of their clipboard into the script while trying to find the keyboard shortcut for "print"."
"As for me, I'm stuck in a loveless relationship with myself, the backseat driver who can't stop tutting and nagging. There's no escape from me's relentless criticism. Me even knows what I'm thinking, and routinely has a pop at Me for that. "You're worrying about your obsessive degree of self-criticism again," whines Me. "How pathetically solipsistic." And then it complains about its own bleating tone of voice and starts petulantly kicking the back of the seat, asking if we're there yet."
"Until this week the one thing I knew about the Twilight saga was that it had vampires in it, which was enough to put me off. I didn't realise it was a romantic fantasy aimed at teenage girls. Turns out it's possible to be put off something twice before you've actually seen it."
"In some quarters the films and books are lauded for their wholesome message, which is weird considering Bella is essentially deciding whether she'd rather shag a bat or a wolf. She's got zero interest in honest-to-goodness human-on-human action. No. It's magic farmyard creatures or nothing for her."
"Fictional serial killers are usually more pretentious than frightening, perpetually quoting Milton or arranging their victims in poses designed to evoke the martyrdom of St Sebastian. What are you, a cold-blooded murderer or the controller of Radio 3?"
"Forgive my pants for remaining unshitten."
"I'll stop calling it the iPhone right now. Instead, for the remainder of this article, it'll be known as the Jabscreen. A better name in any case."
"But once I had a Jabscreen of my own, I soon discovered the novelty lasts six months, tops. There's a limit to how many conversations you can have about it before you reach burnout. Have you seen the app which takes your photo and makes it look like you're really fat? Yes. And the game where you land all the planes on the runway? Yes, that too. Hey, how about this thing with the funny red monster that repeats everything you say? Please leave me. Please just leave me here to die."
"Thoughtfully, just as Jabscreen owners everywhere were running out of apps to compare – and, by extension, anything to talk about – the nice droids at Apple Castle gifted them a whole new branch of conversation: the launch of the Jabscreen 4, which apparently is miles better than a regular Jabscreen, although no one can really explain why. Its most impressive feature is this: simply by existing, it suddenly makes your existing Olde Worlde vanilla Jabscreen seem rubbish. How can you enjoy sliding the little icons around on your Jabscreen 3 when you know that if you had a Jabscreen 4, those very same icons would be slightly sharper? The answer is you can't."
"Even if the Jabscreen 4 was reportedly biting users' ears off and spitting them into a ditch, every Jabscreen 3 user is going to wind up buying one anyway."
"Modern 3D cinema technology works by ensuring your left eye sees one image while your right sees another. But they could, presumably, issue one pair of specs comprising two left-eye lenses (for children to wear), and another with two right-eye lenses (for adults). This would make it possible for parents to take their offspring to the cinema and watch two entirely different films at the same time. So while the kiddywinks are being placated by an animated CGI doodle about rabbits entering the Winter Olympics or something, their parents will be bearing witness to some apocalyptically degrading pornography. The tricky thing would be making the soundtracks match. Those cartoon rabbits would have to spend a lot of time slapping their bellies and moaning."
"I usually quite like women, but this advert makes me want to kill about 900 of them with my bare hands. It ends with the tiresome ladettes marching down a high street triumphantly singing the Here Come the Girls song out loud, like an invading squadron tormenting the natives with its war cry. Next year they'll probably be armed. Fear this."
"The insomniac brain comes in various flavours; different personality types you're forced to share your skull with for several hours. It's like being trapped in a lift with someone who won't shut up. Sometimes your companion is a peppy irritant who passes the time by humming half- remembered TV theme tunes until 7am. Other times it's a morose critic who has recently compiled a 1,500-page report on your innumerable failings and wants to run over it with you a few times before going to print. Worst of all is the hyper-aware sportscaster who offers an uninterrupted commentary describing which bits of your body are currently the least comfortable. No matter where you put that leg, he won't be satisfied. And he's convinced you've got one arm too many."
"...The result is the most nauseating display of artificial camaraderie since the horrific Doritos "Friendchips" TV campaign (which caused 50,000 people to kill themselves in 2003, or should have done)."
"The second Transformers movie came out this year. I didn't fight for a ticket. I'd caught the first one by accident. It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours. Any human dumb enough to voluntarily sit through a second helping of that unremitting fecal spew really ought to just get up and leave the planet via the nearest window before their continued presence does lasting damage to the gene pool."
"The only other thing I've noticed is some kind of acute muscular spasm in my neck and left shoulder, and that's hardly entertaining, except maybe for the bit where the doctor rather brilliantly prescribed me diazepam so I necked some and walked very slowly around the Westfield shopping centre listening to Henry Mancini's Pink Panther theme on repeat on an MP3 player, smiling eerily at shoppers."
"President Barack Obama. President Barack Obama. Nope, still can't get used to it. It's literally too good to be true. I must've died in my sleep and am now having an insane fantasy pumped into my head by the Matrix. Any minute now Salma Hayek is going to float through the door with a tray of biscuits and I'll know the game's up."
"Darwin's theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it's been under attack since day one. That's just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we'd still be debating Newton with idiots too."
"Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning."
"If this strikes you as a trivial subject to write about, you're wrong. Really. Bollocks to the rest of you. I could've sat through live 3D news footage of some gruesome bloody war, watching starving women and children being machine gunned in the face by Terminator rebels, and I'd have just shrugged. So what. Stop crying. They're only bullets. Try having my throat. Try some genuine suffering, you pussies."
"I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui."
"If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality."
"I'm quite hardcore on this. I think every psychic and medium in this country belongs in prison. Even the ones demented enough to believe in what they're doing. In fact, especially them. Give them windowless cells and make them crap in buckets."
"God has far better things to do than creating self-important little species such as ours. He's got wars, deaths, disasters and diseases to ignore for starters. And a fair bit of not-exist-ing-at-all to be getting on with."
"It's a rum state of affairs when you feel like punching a jar of mayonnaise in the face."
"Don't accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a 'closed mind' or being 'blind to possibilities'. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.""
"You can't press a button to make Phil Mitchell jump over a turtle and land on a cloud (unless you've recently ingested a load of military-grade hallucinogens, in which case you can also make him climb inside his own face and start whistling colours)."
"If you're hell-bent on making your bank look and sound like a simpleton, a desk labelled Travel Money is still a bit too formal. Why not call it Oooh! Look at the Funny Foreign Banknotes instead? And accompany it with a doodle of a French onion-seller riding a bike, with a little black beret on his head and a baguette up his arse and a speech bubble saying, "Zut Alors! Here is where you gettez les Francs!""
"If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass."
"On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?"
"Anyway, Big Brother 7: that was that. Big Brother 8 is scheduled to take place in the glowing centre of an irradiated war-torn wasteland formerly known as Earth. See you there."
"The BB house works as a kind of twat amplifier, you see. Once harnessed within, someone who in normal life would merely strike me as a bit of a git quickly swells in negative stature, eventually coming to symbolise everything I hate about our cruel and godless universe."
"In many ways, Big Brother is the present day equivalent of a 1980s Club 18-30 Holiday - flirting, sunbathing, silly little organised games, and lots of people you'd like to remove from the genepool with a cricket bat."
"2007 is going to be the best year ever made. All wars will end. We'll cure cancer and Aids - twice. In February it'll rain banknotes for a week. In July, rabbits will learn to talk. Better still, they'll tell jokes - hilarious jokes, jokes you don't need to be a rabbit to appreciate, jokes offering a fresh, rabbity perspective on human foibles, making us unite as one, laugh at ourselves and frig each other off for the sheer joyous hell of it. In December, we'll make contact with a benevolent race of aliens who shit chocolate and piss lemonade."
"Right now, the theme is "Sex In The 80s", which must've been an exceptionally hard sell round Channel 4 towers. Mullets! Tits! Duran Duran! More tits! Bigger mullets! Ha ha ha! All you need is a few seconds of voiceover babble about "changing attitudes" and "social upheaval" laid over the top and hey presto: you've justified everything. It's not just a load of tit shots - it's a sociological investigation. With tit shots."
"I won't get over that in a hurry: my least favourite atrophied Hazel McWitch lookalike in the world, singing "I just want to make love to you", right there on primetime telly. She has to be the only person on Earth who can take a lyric like that and make it seem like a blood-curdling threat without changing any of the words."
"A lot of people think right-wingers aren't capable of being amusing at all. Not true. Mussolini looked hilarious swinging from that lamppost."
"Maybe you've put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that's no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb. Buy a pillow. Don't make up a load of floaty blah about energy or destiny. This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies."
"You could grind a dog's head and a shoe together into a paste and spoon-feed it to me, and I'd probably think it was chicken liver pate, provided I kept my eyes closed, and provided you plucked all the dog hair out beforehand, and provided you'd managed to find a pestle and mortar big enough to mash it all up in, and provided - look, it wouldn't be worth it. I'm just saying I can't taste anything. There's no need to get carried away. What's the matter with you? You're an idiot."
"Early on, presenter Mark Evans observes that a snake is essentially just "one massive tube with a head at the end", which, coincidentally, is also how he might describe his genitals to an audience of blind women in a hypothetical situation I've just invented in which hen nights for the visually impaired are held in special strip clubs where naked men describe their bodies in time to disco music. For what it's worth, I don't know what I'm going on about, either."
"He could probably make you a cloud sandwich if you asked. Or a blancmange made of numbers."
"The upper classes really shouldn't open their mouths on television. Whatever it is they're saying, all your brain actually hears is "Tra la la, I live in a bubble, tra la la, murder a fox, tra la la, Conde Nast Traveller, tra la la, Kensington High Street, tra la la." They should know their place and keep quiet."
"Do you consider the pursuit and slaughter of animals for entertainment a God-given right, even though it clearly fucking isn't? Are you infuriated by the lack of local shops, even though their closure is a direct consequence of pricks like you going to Sainsbury's in your Land Rover every week? Does the paucity of rural buses, post offices and police stations enrage you, even though it was avaricious cunts like you voting the Tories in for 18 years that got these services into such a state in the first place? Do you think farmers should be granted further subsidies, even when both the BSE and Foot and Mouth debacles were largely a result of their grisly cost-cutting exercises? Do you think it's basically a class issue? You're right. It is. You're a bunch of chasm-gobbed Fauntleroys, and no-one feels in the slightest bit sorry for you - in fact the further you march, the louder we'll laugh, because you brought it all on yourselves."
"I'm not gonna lie, I love the holidays. But Christmas was a lot more fun when you weren't paying for it."
"It's really no different for me 'cause I work for BET so it's like the writers are always on strike."
"You know what so funny, this strike has been going on for a long time. It's lasted longer than the Civil Rights movement, what the hell is this? It's painfully obvious to me white people don't know how to protest. You need like an Al Sharpton, have a dream, go to the mountaintop, do something!"
"They had this movie called Juno about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and it's nominated for an Oscar. That's an unusual experience for me, 'cause when a black girl gets pregnant it ain't no Oscar. It's social work and a box of condoms is what that is."
"I think politics in general are just like a popularity contest but McCain is just... old."
"Debbie Reynolds died a day after her daughter [Carrie Fisher] did! Black Mama's don't die cuz they kids do!They cry and say God don't make no mistakes!"
"Because it's the best idea ever invented in the history of the world!"
"There's nothing better than a party that turns into a death trap."
"Gone with the Wind, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, they all should have had the hero cut down by a Dalek, and they would've been vastly improved really."
"Five million Cybermen, easy. One Doctor? Now you're scared."
"We will sing to you, Doctor. The universe will sing you to your sleep. This song is ending. But the story never ends."
"Carr was left with a ring, in the palm of his hand, a small gold circle, leading him nowhere."
"They passed a farmhouse, a simple shack surrounded by animals — a lazy burro, clucking chickens, a litter of pigs. The farmhouse stood alone in the desolate landscape. There was no sign of a living person anywhere. And then it was gone, lost in the swirling dust plume of the car."
"Characterization lies at the heart of the impulse to polarize every issue — what we might call the Crossfire Syndrome. We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us hold these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion. The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification — framing the debate in terms that ignore the real issues."
"This polarization of the issues has contributed greatly to our national paralysis, because it posits false choices which stifle debate essential to change. It is ironic that this should happen in a time of great social upheaval, when our society needs more than ever to be able to experiment with different viewpoints. But in the media world, a previously established idea, like a previously elected politician, enjoys a tremendous advantage over any challenger. Hence the familiar ideas continue to be repeated, long past their demonstrable validity."
"Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?"
"Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time. We live today in an era of discovery that far outshadows the discoveries of the New World five hundred years ago."
"Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this. [...] Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. [...] You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. [...] You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. [...] But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. [...] The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."
"I want to mention in passing that punditry has undergone a subtle change over the years. In the old days, commentators such as Eric Sevareid spent most of their time putting events in a context, giving a point of view about what had already happened. Telling what they thought was important or irrelevant in the events that had already taken place. This is of course a legitimate function of expertise in every area of human knowledge. But over the years the punditic thrust has shifted away from discussing what has happened, to discussing what may happen. And here the pundits have no benefit of expertise at all. Worse, they may, like the Sunday politicians, attempt to advance one or another agenda by predicting its imminent arrival or demise. This is politicking, not predicting."
"Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."
"Science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid — and merits universal acceptance — only if it can be independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method means it is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It's verifiable whether you like the results of a study, or you don't."
"I want to state emphatically that nothing in my remarks should be taken to imply that we can ignore our environment, or that we should not take climate change seriously. On the contrary, we must dramatically improve our record on environmental management. That is why a focused effort on climate science, aimed at securing sound, independently verified answers to policy questions, is so important now."
"Whatever I am doing, I wish I were doing one of the other things."
"The cabbie laughed. "All right, mister. A guy can tell when he's being kidded." Sometimes," Jencks said, "but only sometimes."
"Steve Jencks: The computer doesn't have any ideas. It only evaluates mine..."
"You could not predict what would happen in a single instance, a single throw of the dice, a single pitch in the seventh inning, a single toss of the coin. But you could predict three out of five, four out of ten, seven out of sixteen, and to that extent chance governed everyone, all the time. Just as surely as two equals two."
"Egypt imbued the view with a heavy sense of mystery and foreboding."
"You want to know about the last tomb? [Conway] asked Pierce. "I'll tell you." He tapped the white cranium. "That's the last tomb, man. Right there, and you're buried there all your life. You can't escape it."
""I would give anything to know what you thought at the moment you died," Pierce said. His voice echoed in the tomb. The flame went out."
"In a sense that is a part of the training: surgeons are lonely men."
"I tried to tell which was Randall, but I could not; in their gowns and masks, they all looked the same, impersonal, interchangeable. That was not true of course. One of those four men had responsibility for everything, for the contact of all sixteen workers present. And responsibility for the seventeenth person in that room, the man whose heart was stopped."
"Being on the "Hold" is the technological equivalent of purgatory."
"Sanderson laughed. "There's no problem," he said. "Yet. I've got a pretty tough old neck. I can keep it stuck out a while longer.""
"I smiled, remembering Art's line about doctors being illpolitical. He meant it the way you used words like illiterate. Art always said doctors not only held no political views, but also were incapable of them. "It's like the military," he had once said. "Political views are considered unprofessional.""
"Leland Weston: "Never take a position unless you are certain it can be defended any onslaught. That may sound like good advice to a general, but then, a courtroom is nothing more then a very civilized war.""
"As I went down to my car, [Peter Randall] said, "If you don't want to get involved I'll understand" I looked back at him. "You know damn well I'd have no choice." "I didn't," he said. "But I was hoping.""
"What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question."
""In the conservative region far from the chaotic edge, individual elements coalesce slowly, showing no clear pattern." - Ian Malcolm"
"Standing next to Arby, Kelly always felt awkward and gawky. Kelly had to wear her sister's old clothes, which her mother had bought from Kmart about a million years ago. She even had to wear Emily's old Reeboks, which were so scuffed and dirty that they never came clean, even after Kelly ran them through the washing machine. Kelly washed and ironed all her own clothes; her mother never had time. Her mother was never even home, most of the time. Kelly looked enviously at Arby's neatly pressed khakis, his polished penny loafers, and sighed. Still, even though she was jealous, Arby was her only real friend - the only person who thought it was okay that she was smart. Kelly worried that he'd be skipped to ninth grade, and she wouldn't see him any more."
"’Because it means the end of innovation,’ Malcolm said. ‘This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it get harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same… Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource. That’s disappearing faster than trees."
"A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies. And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. You see all of us together? That's real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else."
"If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later, moving images would be transmitted into homes all over the world from satellites in the sky; that bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; that antibiotics would abolish infectious disease but that disease would fight back; that women would have the vote, and pills to control reproduction; that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; that you could cross the Atlantic at two thousand miles an hour; that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest; that microscopes would be able to see individual atoms; that people would carry telephones weighing a few ounces, and speak anywhere in the world without wires; or that most of these miracles depended on devices the size of a postage stamp, which utilized a new theory called quantum mechanics—if you said all this, the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad."
"He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it. Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored."
"Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree."
"Let’s not escape into mathematics. Let’s stay with reality."
"“The so-called time paradoxes,” Doniger said, “do not really involve time. They involve ideas about history that are seductive but wrong. Seductive, because they flatter you into thinking you can have an impact on the course of events. And wrong, because of course, you can’t.”"
"“But in theory…” “When we are dealing with history, theories are worthless,” Doniger said with a contemptuous wave. “A theory is only valuable if it has the ability to predict future outcomes. But history is the record of human action—and no theory can predict human action.”"
"He had only imagined a slower fighting style from an unconscious assumption that man in the past were weaker or slower or less imaginative than he was, as a modern man. Marek knew this assumption of superiority was a difficulty faced by every historian. He just hadn’t thought he was guilty of it. But clearly, he was."
"In the comfort of the library, he had read accounts of past violent acts, murder and slaughter. He had read descriptions of streets slippery with blood, soldiers soaked in red from head to foot, women and children eviscerated despite their piteous pleas. But somehow Chris had always assumed these stories were exaggerated, overstated. Within the university, it was the fashion to interpret documents ironically, to talk about the naïveté of narrative, the context of text, the privileging of power…. Such theoretical posturing turned history into a clever intellectual game. Chris was good at the game, but playing it, he had somehow lost track of a more straightforward reality—that the old texts recounted horrific stories and violent episodes that were all too often true. He had lost track of the fact that he was reading history."
"What is the dominant motive experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, and how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment."
"Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused—everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of western society at the end of the century."
"In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused."
"But where will this mania for entertainment end? What will people do when they get tired of television? When they get tired of movies? We already know the answer—they go into participatory activities: sports, theme parks, amusement rides, roller coasters. Structured fun, planned thrills. And what will they do when they tire of theme parks and planned thrills? Sooner or later, the artifice becomes too noticeable. They begin to realize that an amusement park is really a kind of jail, in which you pay to be an inmate."
"This artifice will drive them to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that exists for its own sake and assumes its own shape. But of course, nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume its own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic."
"The purpose of history is to explain the present—to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us why the things we value are the things we should value. And it tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power—profound power. The power to define a whole society."
"Things do not turn out the way you think they will."
"They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race. I hope it's not. We might get lucky."
"Julia's original email says, "We have nothing to lose." But in the end they lost everything — their company, their lives, everything. And the ironic thing is, the procedure worked. The swarm actually solved the problem they had set for it."
"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled."
"Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
"The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on."
"Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way."
"Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible. In one context, maybe you will get some mobilization against nuclear war. But in another context, you get Lysenkoism. In another, you get Nazi euthanasia. The danger is always there, if you subvert science to political ends."
"As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part, because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact."
"To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.” But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world—increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward."
"This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right."
"What is clear, however, is that on this issue [global warming], science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out."
"The fact is that the present structure of science is entrepreneurial, with individual investigative teams vying for funding from organizations that all too often have a clear stake in the outcome of the research—or appear to, which may be just as bad. This is not healthy for science."
"In recent years, much has been said about the post-modernist claims about science to the effect that science is just another form of raw power, tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and objectivity that really have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no better than any other undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they anger me. But recent events have made me wonder if they are correct."
"We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears."
"In order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment."
"I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people — the best people, the most enlightened people — do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious."
"Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists."
"Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them."
"There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago? When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?"
"The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die."
"The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk — and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy."
"The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock... it will demand that you adapt to it — and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced."
"I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it."
"Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas."
"We need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead."
"Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth — that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that."
"The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge."
"In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better."
"Mere talk makes drama and spectacle unlikely — unless the talk becomes heated and excessive. So it becomes excessive. Not every show features the Crossfire-style food-fight, but it is a tendency on all shows."
"Endless presentation of conflict may interfere with genuine issue resolution. There is evidence that the television food-fights not only don't represent the views of most people — who are not so polarized — but may tend to make resolution of actual disputes more difficult in the real world. At the very least, they obscure the recognition that we resolve disputes every day."
"I often think people are nervous, jittery in this media climate of what if, what if, maybe, perhaps, could be — when there is usually no sensible reason to feel nervous. Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of the world is near, the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts. We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. Its not sensible to listen to it."
"Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions is genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears."
"I want to make it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is essential to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, now and in the future. I believe that the world has genuine problems and I believe they must be addressed effectively. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and I believe the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance."
"I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely emerges in another form. Even if you don't believe in God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious."
"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world."
"Some people have joked that at about the same time, the White House brought in a science fiction writer for advice on global warming [a reference to Bush inviting sci-fi author and global warming denier Michael Crichton to the White House in 2005]. But this is not a joking matter. We need more scientific data, not less."
"said on nearly every episode, when interrupted by a litigant: I'm speaking!"
"to a defendant's witness wearing a T-shirt reading "BEER EQUALS FUN": Mr. Gordon, that's a ridiculous shirt that you chose to wear to court today. ... I don't know what kind of statement you thought you were making, but if you wanted to leave the impression on this piece of tape that you're going to have on posterity for your children that you are an intelligent, thinking person, that shirt you're wearing belies that fact."
""Yep" is not an answer!"
"You're going to keep your mouth shut until I come to you and ask you a question, then you're going to speak; otherwise Byrd will take you outside until you understand the rules, 'cause here, I'm in charge."
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to have a good memory. If you lie, you're always tripping over your own tie. ("If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything" - Mark Twain)"
"to a defendant raising his hand to speak while plaintiff is speaking: You wanna lose, fast?"
"Why don't you SHUT UP and listen?!"
"to a defendant who called the plaintiff a "witch" after the judge ruled in the plaintiff's favor: You gotta learn to behave yourself, madam. I have a feeling you have a pretty hot temper - not as hot as mine. That's all - out!"
"You're irritating me. It's not a good thing to start off by irritating the person who's supposed to decide your case."
"after someone in audience applauds, causing plaintiff to burst into tears: If there's any more noise from our gallery, you're gonna leave. Got it?"
"Did that sound like a rhetorical question? It wasn't. I want you to answer it, capisce? Now, THAT was a rhetorical question! See the difference?"
"PUT YOUR HAND DOWN!"
"There's just one person who's allowed to ask, or answer, rhetorical questions in my courtroom -- and that's me! Understand? No, don't answer! There you go again."
"I want you to stop getting hysterical over NOTHING!"
"Whoever you think you are, you do not talk to me that way. Not ever. I am not your daughter. How you speak to your own child in your own house is your own business. You can make her cry for all I care; she's your kid, not mine. But that's her, it isn't me. Or can't you tell the two of us apart? Because if you can't, then you've got a far more serious problem than the one that brought you here today. That bigger problem is Byrd."
"to a defendant's witness wearing torn jeans: I'm looking in your direction trying to figure out whether you accidentally tripped on your way coming into court today, or whether you selected those pants because you thought that they were attractive."
"I'm not 25, and I'm not 5'8". But I know when someone is pulling my leg."
"Let me tell you something. This is my playpen, and I get the last word."
"I mean, did you think I was just a fake person here, that they picked out of, you know, that they picked out of a supermarket? Didn't you think that I had any legal experience at all, sir?"
"I got you ten ways from Sunday, madam!"
"Mr. Britton, don't be a wise guy, because I'm gonna mop up the floor with you if you're a wise guy to me. This is my playpen, not yours."
"DON'T SPEAK! See how fast I can get the smile off your face?"
"(To a law student) Does the word "shyster" mean anything to you?"
"(To a football player) If you lie to me, I'll mop the floor with you worse than anyone who's ever tackled you."
"(To a legal intern) Would you mind telling me who you blackmailed, bribed, or slept with to get that diploma? I'd like to mail them a sympathy card."
"Let me tell you something: if you live to be a hundred, you'll never be as smart as I am in one finger."
"...Did you just call me Nurse Ratched!? Byrd. Get rid of him. Now."
"If I could fine you for stupid, I would fine you for stupid."
"Let me explain something to you, Fresh Mouth: I'm the only one who makes jokes."
"to a defendant who claimed he was receiving Worker's Compensation for a bad knee: Well, what did you think you were going to do for UPS, deliver babies?"
"after throwing the defendant and his witness out of the courtroom: I have other things to do today. I have to get home! [points to her wristwatch] JUDGE JUDY IS ON!!! [audience laughs]"
"Don't be a wise guy in here, sir. There's only one wise person in here - and that's Byrd."
"Try not to be too nervous. I only digest litigants on Thursday."
"I don't know why a 57-year-old man would loan an 18-year-old cashier at Whole Foods $250. I don't know why a man would do that. But I can tell you one thing: my husband's not going to Whole Foods anymore."
"Your lawsuit is such a crock of baloney."
"NO it wasn't a gift, you FOOL!"
"Oh, sit down! You're as dumb as he is!"
"You pulled out a gun, and you shot the gun over FLOWERS! Are you a MORON?!! ... You should be hiding under a rock, not acting as plaintiff in a lawsuit!"
"to a young woman who was being sued by her aunt for a loan for breast augmentation: And instead of her paying it back every month, you should pay it back every month - certainly you don't go in and get bigger breasts while somebody is sitting there paying back money that they "gave" to you during the course of an emergency! And I don't care if she's harassing you and your family, because quite frankly, you deserve to be harassed! Judgment for the plaintiff in the amount of $3500, that's all."
"to a young woman suing a former friend for a broken toilet: The toilet broke while she was using it - that doesn't mean that she broke it, and it doesn't mean that she's responsible for it! Toilets break - I had one just break in my apartment last week! Cost me $650 to put in a new toilet! You think I went around to try to find the last person who sat on it? [audience breaks into laughter] Don't be STUPID! GROW UP! That's all."
"to a mother who moved her daughter across the country so that the girl's father couldn't see her, because her fiancee was offered a new job: I don't care whether your fiancee was elected President of the United States! You have no right to move your child across the country without [the father's] permission!"
"Consider yourself having been reasonably humiliated in front of ten million people. Now, without saying another word, turn around, and find the exit. Goodbye."
"I don't care whether you had a 30-day notice, a 3-day notice, or a partridge in a pear tree!"
"You say no, I say yes; I win, I'm the judge. Goodbye."
"I don't care about your stress! You should care about my stress; I'm older than you are! (25 Aug 2016 show)"
"to a mother of three suing the defendant for an assault: You don't belong out at a club [at] 12:30 at night when you have a one-year-old, a two-year-old, a five-year-old and a 12-year-old! You belong HOME, reading them stories from a BOOK!"
"Judy: (to defendant, who took 17 purses and 21 belts from the plaintiff to sell on consignment, and was being sued because the plaintiff never got her money or the merchandise back) Where are they? [referring to merchandise] Defendant: I couldn't sell them, and... Judy: So what did you do with them? Defendant: I threw them away. Judy: Well then, you're the dumbest thing that I've seen all day! What do you mean, you threw 'em away? You think that I believe that? That's what you wrote in your answer. I said, "I have to see the person who says to me..." [audience laughs] "...that I couldn't sell them so I threw 'em away." You think that I believe that? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard! Defendant: I couldn't sell them--- Judy: Why would you want to tell ten million people - how stupid a response that you could make up in your head and expect somebody to believe!!!"
"Judy: [after catching defendant in a lie; he admitted that he was living with his witness when a few moments earlier he had said he wasn't] PERFECT! So now you're living back together again. And why, Nick, did you feel as if it was necessary to lie to me a moment ago? Defendant: I... have been staying in Minneapolis every now and then... but I... didn't mean to lie to you. Judy: There's another reason, Nick. Defendant: There's no reason to lie. I'm sorry. Judy: Well... Defendant's Witness: Not many people know that he is staying there with me. Judy: Now ten million people know that he's staying with you. [Audience laughs]"
"Judy: Listen to me very carefully, sir. I don't want you to give me the Dumb Routine. Do you know what I'm talking about? If you're dumb, I'll know you're dumb. If you give me the dumb routine, I know it's a dumb routine. Defendant: Yes, ma'am. Judy: I know the difference, Mr. Carey. Do you understand that? Defendant: [grinning] Yes, ma'am. Judy: Okay, very good. Now we understand each other, sir. Believe me, by the time this is over you're not gonna be smiling."
"Judy: [to Byrd] Put him outside. Byrd: Put who outside? Judy: [points to defendant] Him. Byrd: Him? Judy: Him. Defendant: [muttering under his breath as he is escorted out of court] Oh, man. The story of my life. Judy: [to plaintiff] Mr. Britton's fifteen minutes of fame is over."
"Plaintiff: By the way, Your Honor, you look beautiful. Judy: Don't go there, Mr. Missry, because it'll be the fastest way for you out the door, sir. Plaintiff: I'm sorry. Judy: The fastest way for you out the door."
"Judy: [yelling at defendant, who is being sued for bleaching plaintiff's clothes and has just cursed at plaintiff in court] LISTEN TO ME!!! Where do you think you are? You think you're on Springer? [audience laughs] You're NOT! You're NOT! You wanna go to a therapist, go someplace else--- Defendant: No, I don't need a therapist. Judy: Listen to me! Defendant: I don't need to see a therapist... [continues trying to talk over Judy] Judy: Only one person is going to have--only one... judgment for the plaintiff in the amount of $5000! Your counterclaim is dismissed! Defendant: Excuse me? No! What about my computer? But what about my computer? But what about my computer? Judy: [getting up to walk off the set] That's all. Your counterclaim is dismissed. Defendant: ...and you just gonna walk away like that? That don't even make no sense! What about my computer, I don't get no chance to say nothin'... Judy: [over defendant's continued protests] I told you - I told you: it's my playpen, I have the word. Goodbye, go someplace else!"
"Judy: [indicating defendant's sister, who has worn a mini-dress to court with a matching jacket] Where's the rest of her outfit? [audience laughs] Defendant: That was the most... professional clothing she could find, I guess. Judy: [to sister] You don't have a pair of long pants? Defendant's Witness: I do, but I... I just feel this is appropriate, since it's sold in stores. Defendant: Sold in, like, business apparel stores. Defendant's Witness: Yes, business apparel. [Judy and Byrd share an incredulous glance] Byrd: Different kind of business, I guess. Judy: [to sister] Do you go to church? Defendant's Witness: I'm a Christian. Judy: Did you ever go to church? Defendant's Witness: [giggling] Yes... Judy: [audience laughs and she raps on her table for them to be quiet] Did you ever go to church? Defendant's Witness: Yes, I did. Judy: Would you wear that outfit to church? Defendant's Witness: No, I wouldn't. Judy: No. You know, I just wanted to know where your head was at...When did the plaintiff put a fuel pump in your car? Defendant: Um, I would say May. Judy: May of 2010? Defendant: Yep. Around my birthday. Judy: "Yep" is not an answer. Defendant: Yes. Judy: [points to defendant's sister] "Yes" is an answer. "Yep" goes with that outfit. [audience laughs again]"
"Defendant: ...I have a lot to be proud of. Judy: Like what? Defendant: I graduated high school. Judy: Oh, well! That's, like, the Eighth Wonder of the World; isn't it! Defendant: Yes; by our family's standards, that's a great accomplishment. Judy: Yeah, right; so is tying your own shoelaces, I'll bet."
"Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me."
"I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it too."
"Now that this mess is almost behind me – I just have one last request: HBO, when you make the movie about this whole NBC late night fiasco, I’d like to be played by Academy-Award winning actress Tilda Swinton."
"Before we end this rodeo, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can't say about NBC. To set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, the Late Night show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I have worked with NBC for over twenty years. Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we're going to go our separate ways. But this company has been my home for most of my adult life. I am enormously proud of the work we have done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible. Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the medium. But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and, for seven months, I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I've had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-Eleven parking lot, we'll find a way to make it fun. And finally, I have to say something to our fans. The massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the Internet, and the fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain to be in our audience, made a sad situation joyous and inspirational. To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism - it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. As proof, let’s make an amazing thing happen right now. Here to close out our show, are a few good friends, led by Mr. Will Ferrell…"
"This is unusual and upsetting but we got some news -- we got some news during the show that -- that Robin Williams has passed away. (some in the audience audibly gasp in disbelief) And by the time we air the -- we tape these shows a few hours early -- and by the time you see this now on TV I'm sure that you'll -- you'll know. I'm sorry to everyone in our studio audience that I'm breaking this news. This is absolutely shocking and -- and -- and horrifying and so upsetting on every level and we're at the end of the show and it just felt like we needed to just acknowledge. Obviously, we don't know much yet. We know that this has happened and we're absolutely stunned."
"Sit on a park wall Ask all the right questions "Why are the horses racing taxis in the winter?""
"Every dollar counts And every morning hurts We mostly work to live Until we live to work"
"But, wait, Oh, it's much too late Oh, and I cannot be walking home Until I've found my love."
"I think ur a contra, And I think that you’ve lied. Don’t call me a contra Till you’ve tried."
"His Honor drove southward seeking exotica, Down to the pueblo huts of New Mexico, Cut his teeth on turquoise harmonicas, Oh, Oh, Oh..."
"a writer once asked what I'd say if i ever met my biggest hater. I paused, thought deeply and said, "probably 'suk a dog dik, motherfuker'""
"that story is 93% true"
"#1000daysof1d congratulations. may you reign for 1000 years. your humble servant, ezra"
"7 min or less - ur not late, 7-10 "sorry", 10-20 "SO sorry!", 20-30 "i am truly ashamed", over 30 min late - fake ur own death"
"He is the embodiment of Fleet Street bullying, using his newspaper to peddle his Little-England, curtain-twitching Alan Partridgesque view of the world, which manages to combine sanctimonious, pompous moralising and prurient, voyeuristic, judgmental obsession, like a Victorian father masturbating secretly in his bedroom."
"The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it."
"Hello, good evening and welcome."
"Seriously, though, he's doing a grand job!"
"Having one child makes you a parent; having two makes you a referee."
"David Frost has risen without trace."
"I was learning that, even for a woman with power, the path was dotted with land mines—she's so ambitious. she's so aggressive. she's ruthless. "Funny thing," I used to say, "a man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless . . . all a woman has to do is put you on hold.""
"I am so daunted by [reputation] that I never think about it. It is a thing bigger than I am capable of perceiving. Other people are more aware and concerned with it than I could ever allow myself to be."
"I don't know what my image is. I went to France to publicize Marvin's Room, and one really smart young woman journalist said to me "You know, what I told people I was going to interview Meryl Streep, they were so excited...all ze woman in my office, they love you so much. But ze men - they are afraid of you.""
"Hollywood to me is what it is to you. It's something other than what I am. I sit outside it."
"I live simply. I don't buy a lot of fashion!"
"Well, aren't we all grateful to be alive? I just know lots of people … at my age, I've lost a lot of people in my life and I'm very grateful to be here. That's what I mean."
"I don't really. In our business, you're not kicked out necessarily …"
"No! But they were here [in Los Angeles]. Here they were surprised, because it was difficult to finance, the film. A lot of the executives would say, 'I just don't get it.'"
"Half of me is Streep and the other half is Wilkinson from Lincolnshire so I come by it honestly, this part."
"I am nothing but these people, and as an actor I'm always trying to call up lives and the reason I know these things as an actor is because I have the DNA of all these crazy people."
"I'm so sorry to hear this, but this is what it is. It makes it feels like it's sort of my fault on some level, but it also connect be to those events, those first encounters between the two cultures must have been raw, terrifying, brutal and final. conflicts in early American history, known as King Philip’s War, or Metacom’s War, Lawrence Wilkinson defended his town in the face of fierce violence from the Native Americans."
"[On the situation for women in Afghanistan] Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedom than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face, she may chase a squirrel in the park. [...] A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban. A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not in public. This is extraordinary. This is a suppression of the natural law. The way that this culture, this society has been upended, is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world."
"I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience."
"One of my only role models as a young woman was Meryl Streep and, specifically, her character in Out of Africa. I would watch the movie whenever I needed inspiration because Ms. Streep so brilliantly portrayed an incredibly courageous woman who stands alone to save her plantation. Her performance and the strength of her character were tangible examples of how I wanted to be in the world, and I soaked it in and learned from her experience."
"Streep, who was born in New Jersey, is known to have historic family ties to Pennsylvania and Rhode Island."
"Meryl Streep could obviously have made it to the screen on looks alone. The camera embraces her. Lucky camera. Many women would kill for her slender, fashion-model figure, for that ash-blond hair, oval face, porcelain skin and those high, exquisite cheekbones. Her eyes mirror intelligence; their pale blue sparkle demands a new adjective: 'merulean]. Only a slight bump down the plane of her long, patrician nose redeems her profile from perfection."
"Even [being] in a rehearsal period, with Meryl Streep watching, is a behind-tightening experience."
"Her roots go back to England: We traced her back to her eighth grand-grandfather born in England in 1620. In 1645, he shows up in Providence, Rhode Island, as one of the founding fathers of Rhode Island."
"Meryl Streep’s image is composed of two distinct image clusters centered on her renown as a great actress and her reputation as a devoted wife and mother. A more muted aspect of her star persona – one that is often masked as merely an offshoot of her maternal devotion –is her social activism."
"And at this stage in her seemingly charmed life, when she's moved to Los Angeles and has three children in three different private schools and is redoing a house on the Westside and worrying about fabric samples, she's careered off the beaten path of high drama, if temporarily, to cultivate her comedic connections."
"Thank you for videotaping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my personal beliefs. I believe that everyone thinks they can write. This is not true. It is true, however, that everyone can direct. I believe that the Laws of Karma do not apply to show business, where good things happen to bad people on a fairly regular basis. I believe that what doesn't kill us makes us bitter. I believe that the obsessive worship of movie, TV and sports figures is less likely to produce spiritual gain than praying to Thor. I believe that Larry was a vastly underrated Stooge, without whom Moe and Curly could not conform to the comedy law of three (thanks, Lee). I believe my kids are secretly proud of me. I believe that if you can't find anything nice to say about people whom you've helped to make wildly successful and then they stabbed you in the back, then don't say anything at all. I believe I have a great dog, maybe the greatest dog in the whole wide world, yes, he is! I believe that beer is a gateway drug that leads, inevitably, to vodka and somebody oughta do something about it. I believe that when ABC reads this, I'm gonna be in biiiig trouble. I believe that Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High", is the greatest rock song ever recorded. Once again, thanks for watching "Dharma & Greg". Please be sure to tune in again to this vanity card for more of my personal beliefs."
"Once again, thank you for video-taping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some more of my beliefs. I believe that the guy who invented those speed bumps in the freeway that snap you back into consciousness when you're drifting into a nearby semi should be given a big hug. I believe that there are actually several cures for the summertime blues. I believe that in my earlier statement of beliefs, I erroneously believed that beer was a gateway drug that led to vodka. After intensive consultation with ABC executives, I now believe I was very, very wrong. Beer is good. Especially beer brewed by major manufacturers, and enjoyed in a responsible fashion. I believe I've spent my life expecting people to behave in a certain way. I believe that when they didn't behave according to my expectations, I became angry, sad, confused and occasionally fearful. I believe these expectations are the reason I've been angry, sad, confused and occasionally fearful more than I care to admit. As a result, I now believe my expectations are the real problem. I believe that everyone has this very same problem, and they ought to start acting accordingly. Well, that's all for now. I hope you continue to watch "Dharma & Greg" and check in on my vanity card for more of my personal beliefs."
"Once again, thanks for video-taping "Dharma & Greg," and freeze-framing on my vanity card. The following are a few more of my beliefs: I believe that El Niño is an international conspiracy perpetrated by evil roofing contractors. I believe it's high time The Beatles came clean on that whole "Paul is dead" thing. I believe that anyone who can read and speak clearly can be a network news anchorperson -- but not necessarily a weatherman. I believe that if I rid myself of insatiable cravings, lusts, paranoia, deep-seated anger and ill-will towards others, I'll be a much better person. I believe that TV is the cause of all the violence and immorality in our society -- ha! just kidding. I believe there's no business like show business, although if you're over-paid for feeding a big, scary monster, then that might be sort of like it. That's all for now, gotta go make a TV show. Once again, thanks for watching and keep checking for more of my beliefs real soon!"
"I believe I'm growing skeptical of cynicism."
"I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that if you've read this far in my vanity plate you are an extraordinary person infused with great love and compassion. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. (thanks, Jeff) I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy."
"Well, once again I'd like to thank you for not only watching, but videotaping "Dharma & Greg." I know you're busy, so this shows a wonderful commitment on your part and I want you to acknowledge that commitment with a big ol' Chuck Lorre vanity card hug. Okay, with that done let's get on with why you're here, to learn more of my personal beliefs. I believe that this episode, which on the surface deals with a funny Valentine's adventure, in fact grapples with the weighty issue of Weltschmerz. Weltschmerz is a German word which loosely means "world suffering deriving from the inevitability of reality to never match up with our expectations." Boy, only the Germans could come up with a word like that. Anyway, in this episode Greg is in Weltschmerz hell as he discovers that life is never quite like the brochure. Dharma, on the other hand, recognizes that life is a flowing river and happiness exists only when one embraces its ever-changing nature. From this dilemma we draw the comedic essence of our story. Finally, I believe that when I retire and teach sitcom writing at a community college, I'll use this theme for one of my classes to impress the kids."
"Once again, thank you for videotaping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. For those of you who are new, this is my sporadic attempt to share my personal beliefs with millions of people (hence the term "vanity"). This attempt has led me into communicating many deep thoughts, and, I'm afraid to say, quite a few shallow ones as well. But what I've found most interesting is that after a few weeks, I've discovered myself scrounging for new beliefs. Things about which I could stand up and say with pride, "I believe in this, dammit!" Now that's not to say that I couldn't fill the card with a lot of mindless aphorisms. But do I waste my precious moment in the sun by proclaiming, "I believe that sex with multiple partners in a moving vehicle isn't all it's cracked up to be?" No, I do not. Do I squander this priceless opportunity to announce, "I believe we are better than the animals because we're capable of reading in the bathroom?" Once again, I do not. And so it is for this reason, I have no beliefs to share with you this week. No wait... actually I do believe that JFK had a much better understanding of the word "perks"."
"No need to freeze frame this one!"
"United we stand."
"My lawyer ate my vanity card."
"I got nothin'."
"You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. You broke that poor girl's heart. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. You should've told the truth right from the start. But my intentions were good. I was no slave to my wood. I wanted her to love me for me. He does have lots of riches, which attracts a lot of bitches. Thank you, Alan, but you'll never be on "Glee." Aw, crap. If I may throw in my two cents, your love was based on a pretense. Your relationship with mother is to blame. You didn't suckle on her boobies, you self-medicate with doobies, which explains why you used a made-up name. Cue da refrain. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. Everything you said was a lie. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. But you're still a really, really handsome guy. Thank you. Then what am I to do? So I don't always live with you. Wow, that hurts my feelings, but since I live there beneath your ceilings, I'll bite the pillow like the prison bitches do. Oooh! If she gives me one more chance, we can have a real romance. If she doesn't, we can party in my pants. 'Scuse me, no disrespect, but I have to interject, what makes you think you can steal the show? 'Cause I'm gay! Oh, you're so clearly from L.A. Yeah, I'm gay. And he will always be that way. I'm gay. Or as his Jersey friends would say: A-yo, badda bing, he's a big ol' 'mo. 'Scuse me, but we seem to be digressing, and I find it to be quite distressing. Can we sing about the problem that's at hand? Can Kate get over Sam and love who I am? You confuse me for someone who gives a damn. So bottom line, you're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. And I'll die sad and alone. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. (Ring!) Hold it, everybody, that's my phone. Hello? Kate? You're a douche. (Click!) Douche, douche, douche, douche, douche-y, douche, douche, douche. Douche, douche, douche, douche, douche-y, douche, douche, oooh, you're a douche... you're a dou- You couldn't say it meaner. I'm a big vagina cleaner. Didn't do what I oughta. I'm vinegar and water. On this we all agree. Oh yes, we all agree. Oh good, you finally see, to shining sea. Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Drum roll... You're a douche, you're a douche, just a big, fizzy douche. And that's all I'll ever be. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. And that's all you'll ever be. Douche!"
"Still got nothin'."
"In no particular order, I could not or would not exist without air, food, water, gravity, tides, the moon, the sun, night, civilization, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of the land, ancestors having sex, DNA, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, oceans, ice caps, the kindness of strangers, the Big Bang, familial bonds, smart people, brave people, memory, medicine, the periodic table of elements, tribal instincts, magnetic fields, weather, Earth's molten core, a rotating Earth, a tilted Earth, tectonic plates, sleep, death, heat, consciousness, evolution, teachers and the miraculous, self-regulating chemical factory that is my body. Other than that, I like to think of myself as a self-made man."
"Gratitude."
"Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear me. Happy birthday to me. (And 20 more would be nice)"
"Dear Alf, I'm your number one fan. I like you because you're an alien but you're funny, unlike my brother who's an alien but just a jerk. Anyway, I hope you're enjoying your time here on our planet and have found things to eat other than cats. I recommend chicken nuggets. Sincerely, Missy Cooper, age 10. P.S. My favorite color is pink. What's yours?"
"Connie Tucker is proud to announce that she is sweet on Dr. John Sturgis and they are officially a romantic couple."
"Scrabble fans might be troubled to see 3 Y tiles in tonight's episode. Fear not. The "Super Scrabble" version of the game actually comes with 4 Y tiles. Disaster averted."
"Congratulations Young Sheldon, for reaching 100 episodes!"
"The Writers Guild of America, of which I am a proud member, is on strike. While I'm pretty sure vanity cards are not covered under the pre-existing contract (I've certainly never been paid to write them), I still feel uncomfortable writing during a period of labor unrest (truth be told, I feel uncomfortable writing during a period of labor rest). Now that I think about it, I'm also uncomfortable with the word "labor". While I've put in very long hours over the years (70 hour weeks were not unusual), I've mostly been sitting on my ass, staring at a computer screen and wondering what comes next (maybe a writers strike should be called "ruminating unrest"). Regardless, I don't want to do anything that inadvertently helps the evil empire, so until a fair and equitable solution can be found, I'm going to walk around in a circle waving a stick with a sign. An activity that more closely resembles "labor"."
"Back in the days of network television, a vanity card in the end credits was a means by which writer-producers could express their creative dominion over the just-viewed show. It was dubbed a vanity card because vanity was all it had going for it. The actual producer of the show was the company that financed the show - that took the financial risk. The hierarchy was simple, the writer-producer couldn't fire the company, but the company could fire the writer-producer. I can vouch for this because I've been fired. A couple of times. But here we are now in the world of streaming television. On the plus side, a world where end credits are barely viewed by anyone. The viewer is actually encouraged to skip over them and quickly re-engage with another episode, or a different show or movie. Which brings me back to vanity cards. Why on Earth am I writing vanity cards for Bookie? My friends and family won't bother to read them. They might not even be able to find them. One might say, "If a vanity card is written on Max, and no one reads it, was it amusing?" Fuck if I know."
"Hi! It's been awhile. Haven't written a vanity card in what? Nine, ten months? There was a writers' strike. An actors' strike. A directors'... oh well, doesn't matter now. We're all friends. Colleagues. The folks who go to Sun Valley and the folks who go to San Fernando Valley are all on the same team. Thrilling audiences around the world. Making 'em laugh, making 'em cry. Making 'em wonder when this friggin' movie is gonna be over. I think I can speak for the thousands of people in show business I've never met, when I say we are very grateful to be back at work. Because it's only when we're working, do we have any sense of self-worth. But that might just be me."
"As I'm sure you know, network television has been undergoing seismic changes. Audiences have so many more choices than ever before, which I believe it's a good thing. The only difficulty is it's hard to measure what constitutes success. In the past, if you enjoyed tonight's premiere episode of Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage, I'd asked you to spread the word. Get some word of mouth going. That's no longer necessary. Now all I need is an algorithm, or bot, or some sort of silicon-based magical genie to secure the future of the show. Hey, Siri! Mm-hmm?"
"Heads up. I'm only writing this one card for Season 2 of Bookie. The reason is no one, not even my family and friends, bothers to read them. It's not surprising. Max actively dissuades viewers from reading end credits, let alone sticking around to read the mischievous word salad that is a classic Chuck Lorre vanity card. They want you, for their own selfish reasons, to immediately leap into the next episode or, failing that, MILF Manor. So once again, do not bother looking for a new card at the end of the remaining 7 episodes of Bookie. There won't be one. Will the world be a poorer place? I like to think so. If you're hungry for a peek inside my fiendishly clever mind. I still have a show with easily accessible vanity cards on CBS. Ask your grandma what that is and where it can be found."
"To the crew of LAFD Fire Truck 14, You saved my home. You made a snap decision to stop a rampaging fire that had already destroyed my neighbor's house. In doing so, you spared me incredible heartache. There are no words that can adequately express my gratitude. Maybe I can buy all you guys a nice dinner and you can watch a grown man cry tears of joy over his chicken parm, let me know."
"Getting the jump on David Ellison, Netflix, Apple, and Comcast, Chuck Lorre has offered to pay one million dollars in cash for Warner Bros. Discovery. To sweeten the pot, Mr. Lorre will include two weeks at a time-share condo in CABO (not Christmas), if WBD agrees to keep the Discovery channels."
"Working at Warner Bros. is like being raised by a single mom who keeps bringing home strange men!"
"My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave."
"You can only hold your stomach in for so many years."
"I can sing as well as Fred Astaire can act."
"We’re only here for a little while, and you’ve got to have some fun, right? I don’t take myself seriously, and I think the ones that do, there’s some sickness with people like that. That’s why I live in Florida."
"I don’t know why I think this, but maybe I’ve got my best work ahead. Maybe I’ll be putting my teeth in the glass, and maybe it will be a very different kind of role, but I want to do something where I’m not driving a car or a truck, where it’s real. Something that people wouldn’t expect me to do. Probably a man in search of himself. But we’re always searching for ourselves anyway."
"Images of cars and highways fill our literature, songs, movies and art, not just in America but worldwide. Books like "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac or "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe were among the first to romanticize driving and road trips. Old blues and early rock songs like "Route 66," "Brand New Cadillac," and "Goin' Mobile" further romanticized cars and highways for the postwar "Baby Boom" generation. Thousands of films and T.V. shows have focused on or predominantly featured cars and car chases: "Rebel Without a Cause," "American Graffiti," "Easy Rider," "Bullet," "The Dukes of Hazzard," the "James Bond" films, and at least half a dozen Burt Reynolds movies. The list goes on... All this pop culture, combined with relentless commercial advertising, has made cars an integral part of our personal identity. We have been taught to equate motor vehicles with wealth, power, romance, rebellion and freedom. Now, everywhere I go in the world, I see cars-millions and millions of cars-in Rome, Guatemala City, Kuala Lumpur, Bombay and Beijing. Everywhere there are huge traffic jams and poor air quality. The number of motor vehicles in the world is growing three times faster than the population."
"I started watching reality shows and being horrified at people signing up to be humiliated in front of the entire country. … I saw one show, The Amazing Race, in which people were eating spicy soup and vomiting and crying. Why would you do that? Also, I was fascinated by these actors and actresses who would sign up to be followed around by cameras in their life. You become a celebrity, not because of your work or what you do, but because you have no privacy. I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. It's worth more than that. I'm worth more than that."
"We treat sex so casually and use it for everything but what it is — which is ultimately making another human being with thoughts and feelings and rights who will grow up to be an adult."
"There are some issues I'm more conservative on. As a parent, I'm concerned that there are so many young, young, young kids — like 12 years old — that are starting to have sex."
"Flying down a tunnel of 1s and 0s is not how hacking is really done. The staff here has been really good about staying away from the cartoony version."
"The thinking in the show, the hacker thinking of how do you approach every problem, I think they're hacking life more than they're hacking systems."
"Humans have a 3 percent human error, and a lot of companies can't afford to be wrong 3 percent of the time anymore, so we close that 3 percent gap with some of the technologies. The AI we've developed doesn't make mistakes."
"Heroes, while it was cancelled last year for low ratings on the network, ironically was the number one downloaded show in the world that year above shows like Lost and 24 and that kind of thing. For a show like Heroes that had all of these illegal downloading, pirating, I wore that as a badge of honour. That's exactly the kind of fan that you want! The kind that actively goes out and find your show."
"[About the 1991 film Diet for a New America narrated by John Robbins] It just changed my life, to see that film. When I saw it, I pledged to become vegetarian immediately, with the plan of becoming vegan. … My goal was always to become vegan, but it was a longer road. … I envy the kids going vegan now; they have so many different resources. … I think, at first, it struck me from an animal perspective, but the argument for the environment and for your own health also struck a cord with me. So it hit me on three different levels."
"Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey."
"The experience I had seeing Star Wars for the first time was mind-blowing. Eleven is a great age to have your mind blown. I will never forget that feeling of seeing "Long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away" fade out. It was the first time a movie made me believe in another world that way."
"It was nothing that I think any one of us took on because it was a gig that was available. It was something that felt like a true passion and something that every single person brought much more than any of us could have expected. … I do honestly feel honored to be part of this group."
"I’ve always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane. … The most exciting thing for me is crossing that bridge between something we know is real and something that is extraordinary. The thing for me has always been how you cross that bridge."
"Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. … That movie was the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns did to our parents' generations, it left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films."
"When I was a kid and saw Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope for the first time, it blew my mind and around the same time, I had friends who were huge fans of Star Trek and I don’t know if I was smart enough to get it, or patient enough. What I loved about Star Wars was the visceral energy of it, the clarity of it, the kind of innocence and big heart of it. Star Trek always felt a little bit more sophisticated and philosophical, debating moral dilemmas and things that were theoretically interesting, but for some reason I couldn’t get on board. It really took working with all these guys and actually working on Star Trek for me to fall in love with that."
"We went from the silent era to the sound era, and now we’ve done it again. Now that we’re digital, I assume we will stay digital for at least 50 years. Everybody says, "Oh, you’re going to replace actors." You can’t replace actors. We’ve created duplicates, clones, but they can’t act. They’re a computer, for God’s sake. If you think back to what was done in the Star Wars films, it unbridled people’s imaginations. That of course fueled the business at ILM because they were being approached more and more to keep raising the bar. Actors will not be replaced: worst case scenario, they’ll have to wear a lycra leotard!"
"I'm the last person he called that night. I wonder, how many girls didn't answer before he got to fat freshman me? Am I in his phone as Schumer? Probably. But I was here, and I wanted to be held and touched and felt desired, despite everything. I wanted to be with him. I imagined us on campus together, holding hands, proving, "Look! I am lovable! And this cool older guy likes me!" I can't be the troll doll I'm afraid I've become."
"I'm probably like 160 pounds right now, and I can catch a dick whenever I want. Like, that's the truth. It's not a problem. It's not a problem."
"We started shooting the film before they'd even come up with a working model of King Kong, it wasn't unusual for the wardrobe to be decided on the day before a scene was going to be shot - usually those things are worked out months in advance. We had a veteran crew, and our cameraman, Harold Wellman, had actually worked on the original 'King Kong' in 1933. It was my first movie, of course, and people would take me aside and tell me that no matter how many more movies I made, I'd never make another one like this"
"When I think back on Kong, that was like difficult too, because there was no reality in making that movie. There was so much that was left to my own devices and imagination. And when I had to play a scene opposite a 45-foot ape, that was bit taxing on your imagination because obviously there was nothing there, you know."
"Primarily we write the show to entertain ourselves. Sometimes I recognize a joke that reminds me of something that I would've busted up at as a kid. I'm happy when I see those kinds of jokes. Because the show is for kids more than anyone else, but most of the time we are just trying to crack ourselves up and trying not to worry about much other than that."
"If you're an aspiring show maker, and you have the means to sit around for a few months, you should be making funny cartoons and uploading them to the internet. I feel like I've discovered this secret about the entertainment industry it's that they're desperate. They're super, super desperate for new talent and constantly developing and canceling things all the time. It's the nature of the business, so if you're one of those people who can make a cartoon so funny that it gets a ton of hits on the internet then the industry is going to be all over your business."
"Dark comedies are my favorite, because I love that feeling – being happy and scared at the same time. It's my favorite way to feel – when I'm on the edge of my seat but I'm happy, that sense of conflicting emotions. And there's a lot of that in the show, I think."
"Any new property is always risky. And my show really didn’t have a strong hook to it. I couldn’t come up with a tag line for it. I just liked that it was friendly and nice, just two friends that hang out in a weird world. I think that’s what was risky. It was boring and you couldn’t see where it would go. I mean, I could. But I don’t think anyone else could see where it could go, in the beginning."
"So weird, how our prejudices have given everyone their lane. Middle Easterner does something, they're a terrorist. Black person does something, they're gang-related, they're a thug. But if a white guy walks into a church killing nine people there, what do they lead with on the news? "And today, in an isolated incident, a lone gunman walked into a church opening fire and killing nine people." It's always a lone gunman. "A lone gunman with no ties to society whatsoever". They always separate them as quickly as possible."
"We drink to enjoy. The Scottish drink to die."
"For me, Donald Trump is an emotional paradox, I'm not gonna lie. Logically, I can process him, emotionally, I struggle. On the one hand, I will admit, I wake up many days terrified at the notion that he's president of the most powerful nation in the world. But I also must admit, I wake up many days knowing he's gonna make me laugh. There's terror and there's joy and I don't know how to feel. You know what it feels like sometimes? It feels like there's a giant asteroid headed towards the earth, but it's shaped like a penis. Like, I think I'm gonna die, but I know I'm gonna laugh."
"You don't go to South Africa to escape racism. That's where you go to stock up. Are you kidding me, that's the one thing that reminds me of home. The racism out here."
"I spend most of my day screaming — and then over time I get tired and then when I'm tired, I start thinking of the jokes. … That's what I always loved about comedy, it is a way for us to just, you know, to numb the pain, to process what we're going through without feeling every single inkling of it."
"For any comedian, your life informs your point of view, the way you see the world. My comedy comes through the prism of race or class, because those are two worlds that collided for me growing up. And I guess that’s served me well, because those themes cross over countries and continents. We’re all still dealing with those issues today."
"I think the most important thing is to instantly give them a sense of who you are and how you feel in that moment. If a speaker is nervous and tells the audience that, people immediately contextualize it and respond accordingly. If a performer is in a good mood or feeling wild and crazy and says so, I’ve found, the crowd will be good at matching that energy. So for me, the rapport is built by a genuineness conveyed as quickly as possible."
"The weird thing is, I always say to people, "When you're poor, being poor sucks. But being poor together makes it a lot better." Right? Because you're in it together. And it doesn't discount the fact that you don't have much. But then you start to enjoy the things that you do have. And that is each other. And so we laughed. We enjoyed ourselves. We had something that sometimes you don't have when you have too much. And that is the ability to focus on the human beings around you."
"Growing up as a young boy in Wakanda, I would see King T’Challa flying over our village, and he would remind me of a great Xhosa phrase: Abelungu abazi ubu ndiyaxoka, which means: ‘In times like these, we are stronger when we fight together than when we try to fight apart.’"
"…I like to think that I am the product of a world of impossibilities. You know, my mother is where she should have never been. I think my mother made greater leaps than I have ever made. It's just that her leaps were made within her world and so maybe don't seem as grand. But I think my family, myself, my country, we come from a place where we have achieved the impossible…"
"Every single one of you, whether you like it or not, is a bastion of democracy. And if you ever begin to doubt your responsibilities. If you ever begin to doubt how meaningful it is, look no further than what's happening in Ukraine. Look at what's happening there. Journalists are risking and even losing their lives to show the world what's really happening. You realize how amazing it is. Like in America, you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth, even if it makes people in power uncomfortable. Even if it makes your viewers or readers uncomfortable. Do you understand how amazing that is? I stood here tonight and I made fun of the President of the United States, and I'm going to be fine. — I'm going to be fine, right? Like, do you really understand what a blessing it is? Maybe it's happened for so long that you — it might slip your mind, it's a blessing. In fact, here — ask yourself this question. Honestly ask yourself this question: If Russian journalists, who are losing their livelihoods ... and their freedom for daring to report on what their own government is doing. If they had the freedom to write any words, to show any stories, or to ask any questions. If they had, basically, what you have, would they be using it in the same way that you do? Ask yourself that question every day. Because you have one of the most important roles in the world."
"I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don’t really need a distinction between them. If I’m doing something on stage and it evokes an emotion, then I might show that emotion, but I also don’t believe in being a preacher. If you have a point, that’s a bonus. But the funny has to come first, otherwise you shouldn’t call yourself a comedian."
"(What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?) Books about self-esteem and depression."
"I felt like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it was, like, the weirdest thing ever. I just came for a tour, I just wanted some of the Wonka bars and then the next thing, I'm, like, managing the Oompa Loompas. I'm like "Aaah! I don't know how this works, this is crazy!""
"Laughter is strange in that if we think of all the emotions that we're able to express or feel, one of the things about laughter that's particularly interesting to me is it's one of the few emotions that robs your pain of its power."
"I think sometimes it's hard for us to think about the possibility of a better future because we haven't lived in it."
"[Interviewer: When you say you "wouldn't be here" with me, what do you mean by that?] You wouldn't be calling me here to have an interview with me, because I wouldn't have done the things that I've done. Because I couldn't have done them alone. Because nobody could have done them alone. Nobody has done the things they've done alone, you know? Like, everyone-- I've seen people tell these stories of climbing Mount Everest and Maya-san, and-- Yo, all those sherpas that went with you, let's talk about them. No one's climbing Everest alone! No one's discovering, y'know, the, the South Pole alone! No, you weren't! In fact, the guy who first navigated the South Pole was led there by somebody, you know what I mean?"
"I hear people all the time go like "I'm gonna put my head down and I'm gonna crush it!" Okay, alone? Good luck."
"I learned so many things at The Daily Show, I'm eternally grateful for them... but I also would like to learn more things? Even in the years I haven't been there, I've re-learned and re-remembered that politics isn't a binary. It's not blue and red, that's an illusion. There aren't two ideas for every problems, that's fake. There are a multitude of ways to discuss any issue and any topic. But if you stay in one place for long enough, then in a good way and in a bad way, you start to perceive that as reality. [...] All my friends that are South African were trapped in South Africa, couldn't leave, couldn't come to me, I couldn't go to them. Couldn't see my family. And I wasn't even big on that, it's not even that I was like "Oh, I've gotta go home to see my family," I just go when I'll go. But now, I realized, I was like, wow! This is just-- again, it's fleeting. And I had to ask myself "Trevor, what are you trying to achieve in your life? Where do you want it to go? Where do you want it to end, y'know? What's more important to you? The ratings on the success of this show and this idea, or the ratings on the success of your friendships and your relationships?""
"[If] you read the news once a week, I promise you, you'll be as informed as somebody who's reading it every single day. You know why? 'Cause when you're reading it every day, you are caught in the cycle of it trying to discover what it doesn't know yet."
"And that is a problem I have with, like, a lot of American political spin -- they try and tell you that what you're seeing is not what you're seeing."
"I think, again, as an old person, you should have a dignified end. You know? And I think we've robbed old people of that in society, y'know, like Capitalism and whatever. It's like, no, it's nice to, like, "You go, you've live your life, you've done your thing, and you can relax now.""
"Ben Carson: for people who like Donald Trump's ideas, but hate his charm and charisma. Ben Carson is like the drug free cocaine for people who don't wanna get high but just like snorting white powder."
"Of course Ben Carson advisors can't make him smart, you can't change its brain. That's a job for a neurosurgeon. It's the same when your barber has a #### haircut."
"Donald Trump didn't invent racism. Trump didn't invent islamophobia. And he didn't invent violence. All he did was put his name on them like he does with everything else."
"Race jokes are kind of like orcas: powerful and entertaining, but you put them on display in the wrong environment and people are going to get hurt, and the joke might die. Like this one just did."
"Hey, son, what the hell is with your haircut? Did you see a paintbrush and say "I want that dude's look!"?"
"The credits from the second Godfather are better than Godfather III."
"Let's be honest: in general men are stronger than women. That's not sexist, it's just true. If anyone is sexist, it's Nature. Yeah, Nature is the one who was hanging stuff out and was like: "Ok, men, you get the big muscles and you orgasm every time you have sex. Hell, sometimes you have an orgasm just by accident! That's how easy it's gonna be for you! And for the ladies... you get to put an entire human being out of your vagina. Have a good day.""
"In life only three things are certain: death, Adobe updates and taxes."
"ISIS without guns is just basically a blog."
"The Trump tape shouldn't offend you on behalf of females. It should offend you as a human being."
"They're conflating sex talk and sexual assault talk, alright? Trying to make Trump's comments sound normal is not something that they're achieving, 'cause I'm sorry, that is not normal. There is a big difference between saying dirty words and glorifying non-consensual sexual contact. Not every guy has these conversations. No. That's a crime. There is a big difference. People are like, "oh, come on, guys talk dirty". Yeah, guys talk dirty, but guys are not all having conversations about sexual assault. It feels like more people are focused on "he said pussy". It's not about that. It's about him saying he forces himself on women. You tell me what's worse - a guy who says, "last night I dined with a lovely lady, and immediately afterwards, I escorted her back to her residence and proceeded to caress her genitals despite her lack of invitation." Or is this one worse - "oh man, last night I was rolling with this bad bitch, and I was like, "yo, you gonna let me smash that ass?", and she said "no", and I was like, "okay, no pussy for me"." Which one is worse? Now, don't get me wrong. Neither of them is ideal, but one of them is crude, and the other is against the law."
"Welcome to the 2016 presidential election. If you're on TV and you say something that offends the nation, you're gonna lose your job. But don't worry, you can still run for president."
"Have you ever argued with a toddler? Because if you have, you probably lost that argument, or you killed the toddler. Either way, you didn't win the argument, because you can't win an argument against a toddler. Toddlers will say the most outlandish shit. [...] Over the course of this election season, we've come to realize that president-elect Donald Trump might have the mind of a toddler. And if you think about it, it makes sense. He loves the same things that toddlers do. They like building things. They love attention, always grabbing things they're not supposed to. [...] You don't argue with a child if you want to win. Don't amplify the toddler's voice, because you'll just get trapped in the toddler's world. Rather, just keep asking the toddler to elaborate. Because logic is the downfall of every toddler. The point is to gently demoralize the toddler and smother his tantrums. And, as a bonus, stop him from delegitimizing the press."
"Juggling is such a white thing, as well, when you think about it. No, just the whole concept. You have so much stuff that, at some point, you are like: "I can't even hold all of this stuff! I'll have to throw some of it in the air!" That's probably how juggling started. Someone was like: "Wow, you have three things, but you only have two hands. Would you like to share something with me?" "No, no, I'll figure this out"."
"He really is a TV president. [...] He loves the performance of doing things. But a lot of the time, nothing's actually being done. Essentially, Donald Trump wants to be president, but he doesn't want to do president."
"At this point, it's not even a high-level controversy. This isn't House of Cards. Like, this isn't even Veep. It wouldn't even qualify for Blue's Clues."
"Donald Trump sees the presidency the same way he sees one of his companies: its whole purpose is to serve him and only him. [...] the whole purpose of the Justice Department, which he thinks is not to uphold law. No, no, no, it's to do the president's bidding. The same way he probably thinks the purpose of the Energy Department is to charge his iPhone. [...] The only thing more shocking than his autocratic view of power is his willingness to talk so openly about it. In a strange way Donald Trump is both the most honest and dishonest president of all time. I figured it out, people. He's not cinnamon Hitler, he's Abraham Nixon."
"Maybe we need to change who gets the Nobel Peace Prize, and when. Because so many people have won the prize and they've benefitted from all of its prestige, and then they've gone on to not be peaceful. Like, maybe we should only give the Nobel Peace Prize to people after their career is over and they've passed away, right? It's at the end. We can call it the "Rest in Peace Prize." Then we know you're not gonna surprise us, you're not gonna hurt anyone. Unless someone trips on your grave."
"This idea that black people should be grateful is some sneaky-ass racism. Yeah, because when a white billionaire spends a year screaming that America is a disaster, he's in touch with the country. But when a black man kneels quietly, he should be grateful for the successes America has allowed him to have? [...] It almost feels like white people earn the money, but black people are given it."
"You still haven't told us the right way for black people to protest. I mean, we know: it's wrong to do it in the streets, it's wrong to do it in the tweets. You cannot do it on the field, you cannot do it if you've kneelt. And don't do it if you're rich, you ungrateful son of a bitch. Because there's one thing that's a fact, you cannot protest if you're black."
"This is what I find weird in these arguments, it's that people go "they're not African, they're French". Then I'm like, why can't they be both? Right? Why is that duality only afforded to a select group of people? Why can they not be African? So what they're arguing here is, in order to be French, you have to erase everything that is African?"
"This is what I find interesting, is, like, when I read stories from Africa and when I watch what politicians say, especially in France, about African migrants: When they are unemployed, when they may commit a crime or when they're considered unsavory, it's the African immigrants. When their children go on to provide a world cup victory for France, we should only refer to them as French."
"Boris Johnson looks like if Donald Trump drank."
"Wait, what? White supremacists aren't a threat because they can only fill a college football stadium? My man, those stadiums hold a hundred thousand people. We shouldn't have enough white supremacists to fill a golf cart, that's how many we should have. [...] White supremacists are like babies on a plane, even one is enough to ruin your day."
"I feel bad for anyone in private insurance who's scared of losing their job. But on the other hand, screw private insurance! I'm sorry, insurance companies are assholes."
"You know what the problem in America is? It's that white people call the police like they're asking for the manager. It's like, "this is unacceptable, I demand to see someone who might shoot you"."
"The part where we say who's good and who's bad and who started-- let's-- let's step away from that and instead ask a different question: Instead, let's look at who's dead and who's alive this week."
"And look, I don't know if I want to eat at a restaurant where everybody's armed. I mean, it's a fun gimmick, but you realize the second someone drops a plate, that place is turning into a Tarantino movie. I mean, it's still a restaurant, so you can't have bare feet, but otherwise, it's a Tarantino movie. But clearly, this person has an unhealthy fixation with guns."
"[A friend] said to me, he said "You know, Trevor, one of the greatest lies they tell you in America, they tell you that-- they tell you that America is two political parties -- Republicans and Democrats", and he said, "But I'll tell you now, it's Republicans, Democrats, and it's black people and every other person of color who's trying to make a name or do something for themselves." And that stuck with me, and it made me think about American politics differently. Made me realize that we get tricked a lot of the time -- not just in America, but everywhere in the world -- into liking or not liking something based more on the tribe that it comes from, the tribe that it emanates from, than what the idea actually is."
"The final lesson I learned at the show -- and I learned it not at the show, but because of the show and the news I was covering is -- please don't forget that the world is a friendlier place than the internet and the news will make you think?"
"If you’re Native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense."
"In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix - and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason."
"That’s how a police state works - everyone thinks everyone else is the police."
"There were so many perks to being ‘white’ in a black family, I can’t even front. I was having a great time. My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids."
"Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks. I knew my cousins were getting beaten for things that I'd done, but I wasn't interested in changing my grandmother's perspective, because that would mean I'd get beaten, too. Why would I do that? So that I'd feel better? Being beaten didn't make me feel better. I had a choice. I could champion racial justice in our home, or I could enjoy granny's cookies. I went with the cookies."
"My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered."
"As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don't ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you're willing to share. For me it was humor. I learned that even though I didn't belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing."
"People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money."
"People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing."
"Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson."
"In the hood, even if you're not a hardcore criminal, crime is in your life in some way or another. There are degrees of it. It's everyone from the mom buying some food that fell off the back of a truck to feed her family, all the way up to the gangs selling military-grade weapons and hardware. The hood made me realize that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn't do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programs and summer jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn't discriminate."
"In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don't see the person it affects. We don't see their face. We don't see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable. We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don't live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place."
"The more time I spent in jail, the more I realized that the law isn’t rational at all. It’s a lottery. What color is your skin? How much money do you have? Who’s your lawyer? Who’s the judge?"
"Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either hate them or love them, but that’s not how people are."
"The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He's attracted to independent women. "He's like an exotic bird collector," she said. "He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.""
"People built homes the way they bought eggs: a little at a time."
"The end of apartheid was a gradual thing. Concessions were made here and there, some laws were repealed, others simply weren’t enforced."
"We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited."
"What was ironic to me was that white people had spent years seeing video of black people being beaten to death by other white people, but this one video of a black man kicking a cat, that’s what sent them over the edge."
"Every year under apartheid, some colored people would get promoted to white. People could submit applications to the government. Your hair might become straight enough, your skin might become light enough, your accent might become polished enough — -and you’d be reclassified as white. All you had to do was denounce your people, denounce your history, and leave your darker-skinned fiends and family behind."
"It's not us that loses financially if we don't have a free trade agreement, it's Germany and France and other European countries, and that's why of course there will be a free trade agreement that allows all our business to trade freely to and from continental Europe. It will take a relatively short period time in my view because they lose financially."
"Did anyone honestly think we were going to walk into a room with the European Union, shake hands, and do a deal in half an hour? These are going to be lengthy negotiations, they're going to challenging negotiations."
"Nobody has ever said the negotiation would be straightforward and simple."
"[A new runway at Heathrow is needed to secure] a clear path to our future as a global nation in the post-Brexit world."
"Finally we have a confirmed use for Chris Grayling. He is the government's secret weapon to make even the most incompetent and second-rate of ministers feel good about themselves. Not content with having wasted the best part of £14m on the government's first-ever roll-on, roll-off pizza delivery service – all toppings guaranteed to be ferry free, the transport secretary has now spent more than £50K on failing to organise a lorry jam in Kent."
"My first exposure to Batman as a character was Batman the TV series. But honestly, I didn’t know it was supposed to be a parody or campy. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Of course, I was 5 at the time. But all in one fell swoop, I became an instant super hero fan. Later on, as I got older and started reading more comics and getting into the super hero scene, I realized that the Batman show was kind of a comedy. I was reading Neal Adams comics and thinking, "Batman is kind of cooler than that show, he’s kind of scary and mysterious." So my perception of Batman changed over time, and then I went through the periods with Frank Miller and the Tim Burton movies. So now I’ve got these warring Batmans in my head. I still love the Adam West/Batman show. I still love the Neal Adams take on Batman comics. I still love The Dark Knight. All of these things totally contradict each other, and yet it’s fine to me. I’ve said it over and over again, Batman as a character is such a strong concept, he’s the kind of character that you can take him in any number of ways and it still feels right."
"I wish I had the answer to that, because if I knew how to create an instantly popular character like that, I would do more of them. It’s weird to me because, on one hand, she’s appealing, but you look at her and she’s not exactly a good role model for girls. And in the past, we have definitely explored some of the darker edges of her story. She was kind of in an on-going abusive relationship with the Joker. So it is weird but maybe a lot of her appeal, at least recently, is because they have separated her from the Joker in comics. She’s become her own standalone character and definitely not in an abusive relationship with the Joker anymore. I guess that is somewhat empowering and people can relate to it. But truthfully, she was a really, really popular character even before all this. I think part of it is probably, to pat my own back, design. She was a really simple basic character in red and black, cute face, cute figure, one and done. So that definitely has to be a part of it."
"I love all the series I’ve done pretty much equally.I haven’t done a single series that I have been embarrassed by. Some of the movies are better than others."
"The more I examined my emotions, the more I was able to put that in my writing. I wanted to concentrate more on human emotions and internal feelings in the characters, inasmuch as I could in an animated cartoon show—ostensibly one for a young audience. There were times when I felt I couldn’t put the depth of feeling that I wanted to in the cartoons at that time, because it’s for kids and you have to keep it kind of upbeat. But I did it where I could. And I put it in my other work as well, when I was writing things like comics and screenplays."
"We came up with the idea of people who are attracted to criminals, especially those who might write to a criminal in jail saying, “I understand you, I sympathize with what you’re going through,” and they just sort of pin all their hopes and dreams on somebody who they think is misunderstood but who is in fact rather dangerous. The fact that Harley might have gone from this intelligent, cool therapist to this crazed clown woman was both very interesting and very tragic to us. We thought that had the makings of a great Batman villain — like Batman himself, his villains start off human but then some tragedy happens and warps them into what they are today."
"In a world that both desexualizes and hypersexualizes people, I am desperate to find companionship and touch."
"One might even call him dreamy. It was a match made in heaven. Or it could’ve been, until he ghosted me."
"It’s not like my standards are that high to begin with. As someone who has spent the greater part of a decade being sexually neglected because I don’t perform gender properly, my standards are comically low. You don’t have to be talented to get in my pants. You don’t have to be charming or funny or witty or able to make great conversation to make me fall for you. You don’t have to have a well-furnished apartment or a beautiful house in order to take me home. Just tell me that you don’t believe in the , let me know that you want to put it in, and I am pretty much yours."
"You could say that I am desperate — because I am. In a world that both desexualizes and hypersexualizes transfeminine people and treats us like street garbage, I am desperate to find companionship and touch."
"Even the most enlightened boys can turn into ghosts."
"Having the chance to watch … ', it was probably one of the first punches. Once I made that connection between loving an animal and eating an animal is when things clicked in my brain. Latinos have this obsession with everything fried, with a lot of animal protein, and, yeah, it’s true—we have a lot of problems with obesity, we have a lot of problems with diabetes, we have a lot of problems with asthma. We have a lot of problems with a lot of things that come from it. And I couldn't believe that to create a toothpaste, or to create a shampoo, there are a lot of animals that have to suffer for that. As you become a vegan, you start learning that everything in your life has to become cruelty free."
"What I've learned over the years is that focus and singular purpose is the best approach for businesses."
"God knows, I’m hardly a sociologist. But I hope in the future for some form of reconciliation. Because I think all men are guilty. I’m not talking about rape and pillage. I’m not talking about Harveyesque. I’m talking about all of the spectrum. From an aggressive flirt. Or even just a flirty-flirt that has one sour note in it. Or what I think every man was guilty of, some form of omission in attitude, in his views. Are we really going to have only capital punishment? Because right now, that’s what we have. You get accused, you’re obliterated. Charlie Rose ceases to exist."
"I’ve always said that I believe deeply in creative conflict, and that means passionately arguing–whatever your thoughts are, whatever the point is. Some people love that and it helps them grow, learn, etc. Some people run for the hills. I’ve always said to people, “Look, it’s not a room for everybody. If you like this environment, great. If you don’t, please leave, because it’s not good for any of us.”"
"I think the important thing is maybe allow the fans to see what they want to see. We don't want to put anyone into a corner where it's like—So other people feel like they're not represented."
"It was exciting. The idea of having this character, who had been so much to so many people. And none of that was based on his sexual orientation, And just to reveal that he is a gay man, and that in no way changes his relationships with any of these people, anything that he’s done. Sometimes it’s amazing to have the stories where the character is finding themselves, but then it’s also incredibly important to have the stories where this character is fully formed, and he’s a gay man, and he’s doing amazing things. And he’s flawed, and he has his own problems. That was why I loved the idea of having Shiro be our representation."
"It was something that came up right from the get-go, but as you know, from the beginning we kind of thought we were going to kill Shiro at one point. And so we’re like, ‘Y’know what? We don’t really want to kill off our gay representation. Maybe we’ll find it somewhere else.’ But then we found out pretty soon after that, Shiro wasn’t allowed to die. Well, all right, we go back to plan one and yeah, it just took us a little while to get to the point in the story where we were able to reveal it. But he was kind of always in the works to be our [gay] representation. It’s a very normal part of his life and it’s just a very normal part of our story. It wasn’t supposed to be, like, scandalous or surprising or-- It’s just daily life. And I think we kind of try to envision a world where all of those things are just normal and accepted and people don’t freak out about them. It doesn’t change who he is at all."
"He is Shiro’s significant other, They weren’t married yet, but that’s the road they were going down Him being gay was just something that we had always wanted to do with him from early on."
"The only national emergency is that our President is an incompetent racist."
"Listen, Otto Von Crybaby, if you're so anxious to go to a country with an unpredictable megalomaniac in charge, just wait a year and you'll live in one!"
"We're not in the 1980s anymore to remember how terrified everybody was, how paranoid everybody was about the end of the world being nigh. In the year that I had prepped this movie in 1983, the Korean airliner was shot down by the Russians, Reagan gave his "Evil Empire" speech, Strategic Defense Initiative, "Star Wars" started and people like Herman Kahn in the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica [...] were talking about "winnable" nuclear war and game theory, and I just thought "people who talk like that, and people who behave like that, politically, and make speeches like that, they're doing that because they have no real sense, no physical sense of what a nuclear war would be like.""
"I remember a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project said to me "you know, when I hear people talking about winnable nuclear wars, I just wish I could take them to the Mojave desert, the Nevada desert, wherever, strip them down to their underwear, and let them watch an actual nuclear explosion from miles away, feel the blistering heat pulse on their skin, and feel the blast wave sweep over them and shake their heart and their lungs around inside their rib cage. Then they would have a sense of what it was they were talking about and they wouldn't talk about a winnable nuclear war.""
"In this movie, from the outset, I wanted to put it in the scale of people that you might know, people like yourself, your immediate family, relations and so on, and no bigger than that, and not really to show anything except how it would happen to them. So, there's no God's eye view in this movie. You don't actually get to look down and get the overall picture and see maps of Europe and maps of the world and so on. You just get what's happening to these people, and it's all really done from ground level. There's no cinematic crane shots or anything like that. It's just very, very documentary."
"The real effect of a nuclear weapon is not what it does to things, to buildings, to cities: it's what it does to society, what it does to people, what it does psychologically. I was very struck by the work that an American writer called Robert Jay Lifton had done on the psychological effects of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima on the survivors and I talked to him a lot. It seemed to me that the story that needed to be told was the story of what this does to society as well as what it does to physical things, and you could only really tell that with a drama, with people that you identified with."
"I can't tell you how much that affected me, in the wrong way. I was, in 1983 when it came out, I was planning Threads, I was in pre-production. And I thought "Oh my God, they will tell it. [...] I hope to God they tell it well. If they tell it well, I'm going to stop what I'm doing". [...] I didn't want it to become something that everybody did. I wanted it to be one thing that was done once and done well, and done with no punches pulled at all. I wanted something you could hardly bear to look at and you can hardly bear to look away from , so something that was totally uncompromising: You didn't look away, you didn't flinch from things. So, I waited for The Day After to come out, [...] I looked at it and I thought "Oh my God, they didn't, they missed it". They missed it! They made a TV movie, they made something like a soap opera because they had to, because they didn't have a genre in their head that they could copy and or invent. And I thought the underlying thought of this is it would all be manageable. At the end of the movie, where everything is ruined, you've got Jason Robards still there and you know that just out of the frame, about to come in, there's all the bulldosers and relief efforts, rescue and help, and it's going to be okay really. And I thought "That's not telling the truth, that's not really the way it would be.""
"There's the hospital sequence in The Day After and there's the hospital sequence in Threads. [...] In The Day After people are being wheeled in on gurneys and everybody's stressed, but they're coping with it as they would do on ER or something like that. In Threads, the floor is covered with muck and shit and blood and people don't have anything they can work with. [...] We see people having their legs amputated without an anesthetic, just something stuck between their teeth for them to bite on. That's what it's going to be like! And I wanted every part of this movie to be "That's what it's going to be like"."
"I wanted him to use all his experience and intuition and empathy with people who'd grown up around him in Sheffield and put that into the movie, and I would be [...] the alien force, who was the voice of what science can do, and I would kind of foist these horrible indignities and horrors on these people, and he would try and get them to behave the way they would. So there was an innate conflict in that. We had many shouting matches, really passionate things, totally necessary for doing this."
"He hated coming on the set and despised me because I wore white shoes."
"He did hate doing it. It was alien to his nature. He reluctantly let himself be drawn into this thing, thinking what he would have done would have been a very passionate politicised scream of emotion, and what he was being pushed into was this box he didn't feel at all comfortable in."
"From the point where the bomb happens, the whole nature of the movie changes. In the first half of the movie, I hope, you have a very full soundtrack. You have all the soundtrack of TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts, the sound of birdsong in the country, the sound of musical things happening, the sound of traffic and city noises. And from the moment that the bomb drops you don't have anything. You don't even have the teletype, all these things, they just type out in silence, and all you hear is wind. [...] You hear voices of people screaming, coughing or whatever. You hear wind, you hear no birds. [...] It's gone. That world is gone."
"This sense of things...getting out of control very quickly is a lesson that we’ve forgotten. [...] I hope we don’t learn it in the wrong way. This is what you’re risking when you talk about fire and fury."
"That period had seen Reagan starting the Strategic Defense Initiative, the downing of the Korean Airliner by the Soviets, and [Reagan] calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. [...] It was perhaps the most dangerous time for the world since the Cuban missile crisis and...there was this feeling that BBC wasn’t dealing with this in any way. Everyone was very paranoid. The world was on the brink of nuclear war and no one knew anything about it."
"It is unthinkable for most people. Nuclear war is so outside your everyday experience it’s hard to get your mind around it. And if you can’t get your mind around it, you can’t talk about it and have a meaningful debate."
"The idea was to take a movie which was about death...and use the iconography of life to tell the story."
"What worries me at the moment is President Trump and many in his administration are using the same kind of language about winnable [nuclear war and] bloody-nose strike against North Korea without realizing the consequences of that. [...] They have a failure of imagination. They can not believe that it could be anything other than surgical. The lesson of everything in nuclear policy through the Cold War is that we’ve come so close to so many times to stumbling into war by miscalculation, by not knowing what the other side is thinking."
"Barry came up with the idea of the two families – one working class, the other lower-middle – and what their lives were like. Sheffield seemed a good place to set it, and Barry knew it well. It was bang in the middle of the country, and a good way from London. Strategically, it also made sense: there were industrial and military targets nearby. Both of us were interested in the idea that none of these characters would ever have a god’s-eye-view of events, and never find out what was happening outside their immediate experience, certainly not outside Sheffield. That seemed to be the way most people would have to deal with a nuclear apocalypse, with most forms of communication vaporised."
"What we’d depicted and its implications stayed in the minds of every actor and crew member for a long time. I’m sure there were some nightmares. There are some things so far outside our experience or comprehension that they are unthinkable. Nuclear war is one."
"People tell me how relevant they find the movie to what’s happening now. It’s comforting, at a time when so many films are being remade, to find that people still appreciate – and are scared by – the original film."
"If we insist on leaving the EU then there is realistically only one way to honour our obligations under the Good Friday Agreement and that is to remain members of both the customs union and the single market"
"[Leaving the EU is] the biggest economic crisis that our country will have faced for many, many generations."
"[Brexit is] the first instance that I can think of in living memory of a government pursuing a policy that they know is going to make our economy smaller and reduce people's livelihoods and life chances and I cannot understand why we in Labour would support that."
"When you're writing a character, you have to know where they're coming from. You may never use that information, but you have to know it. It just helps you mark the journey better."
"I never want to be on a pedestal. Because the same people who put you on a pedestal will throw you of it. I really don't want to be appreciated to the extent that I start living for their appreciation."
"Art has different meaning for different people. For some its realism, for some its escapism, and you have to accept that."
"I could actually tell stories and narratives which were little alternative and radical. For whatever its worth, you can support imperfection. (as an answer to the evolving tastes of the Indian Audience and the rise of the Digital Streaming Platforms)"
"I am an open-minded skeptic. I never go in thinking these things are there, but neither do I discount them out of the gate. I think there’s a number of stories we’ve investigated where I’ve walked away and thought, “Maybe there’s something going on there.”"
"I'm a big believer in that part of the experience, you know? If you talk to anybody about travel, just personally, so much of what they'll tell you about any trip is the mechanics of the trip. How the flight was, what went wrong, what went right, how they got stranded at that train station. One of the things that always struck me as kind of strange about travel-themed TV is how glossy it all is, ya know, which really doesn't match our experiences. That's fine if you're doing an aspirational, you know, "world's greatest pools" kind of thing or something, but you know for us, the journey is the expedition, right?"
"I remember rocking the pram with one hand and typing with the other."
"There was a great buzz and sometimes I felt like awarding myself purple hearts for the work I was doing."
"It was lucky I was hanging around with theatre types who don't really have steady jobs."
"There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."
"Everybody's got an opinion about her, haven't they? Even that charmless female Anne Enright couldn't just accept a fat cheque and the Man Booker Prize for her miserable novel about a large family without telling the world, totally gratuitously, that she hated Kate McCann. Her publishers should have put a large brown bag over her head immediately — because to put down someone who is guilty of no crime, except being fit and attractive, is thoroughly repellent. I urge you not to buy Enright's book until she apologises for this slur on another member of the sisterhood."
"She should, in my view, make a substantial donation to the Madeleine McCann fund -- perhaps half her Booker prizewinnings of €70,000: she will be a rich woman, in any case... But I doubt she will make any such gesture, because I don't think she quite understands how much damage she has done, not just to Mr and Mrs McCann, but to the vital principle that every individual in a properly-run democracy is innocent until proved guilty. She seems to think that the unfortunate aspect was the "timing" of the piece. No, it was not. It was the substance -- and the effect."
"There was no great awakening or such. I did some magazine cartooning years before, but never perused it much. It was just a "freak" opportunity that came up at Hanna-Barbera"
"In very many ways, Joe was the quintessential cigar chompin’ Hollywood producer. In far many others he was atypical in that role. He could keep his focus when everything about him was going completely bonkers, either from network fiat or his own crew running riot. And he always retained his compassion and empathy. I’m sorry he didn’t get to do more projects that he wanted to do, not stuff the networks forced him into producing. I’m glad I had the chance to work for him."
"Once you create the show you are always its creator, no matter how many other versions are produced."
"He was always charming and gracious, and willing to give any harebrained scheme of mine a fair hearing before saying, “You’re nuts, Buzz.” He was without question one of the nicest people I’ve ever met -- and it’s been my privilege to have met and worked with a lot of super-nice people."
"[Question from the audience]: "If you could pick only one thing, what is the most important thing when it comes to creating and running your own series?"Craig McCracken: Characters. Great, likable characters that resonate with audiences. That's the most important thing. Concepts will get you to try out a show, to tune in to a show maybe, but concepts don't keep you watching over and over again. If you're not engaged with the characters and the personalities of the characters, you're not going to continue to watch that show."
"A lot of people come up with these really elaborate concepts, and they get into the weeds of the concepts and how the story's gonna be. That's not what executives wanna see. They wanna see characters that they can engage with, and, also it sounds a little cliche, but the so-called "elevator pitch" or seven words, "try to describe your show in seven words", is a really good exercise. I found it just... work through, y'know, what your idea is about. That elevator pitch is basically "I've got a few seconds to tell somebody my idea, how would I say it?""
"The main inspirations for Powerpuff for me were the '66 Adam West Batman show, and Underdog."
"When I first did my first short for Powerpuff Girls, and we focus-tested it, I'm sure people have heard this story, we showed it to a group of 11-year-old boys, and they said "this is the worst cartoon that has been ever made and whoever made it should be fired." I'm sitting in the room with all the executives watching these 11-year-old boys destroy the show, and... I was like, I went back to the studio and I started redesigning the characters and I gave 'em fingers and I made them more accessible, and I was like "they didn't get it, they didn't get it..." [...] I took that criticism and went, "what did I do wrong? What wasn't I communicating? How I was I not telling this idea clearly?" And what I realized I was doing, is I had been making it in my head for so long, I made an episode that was like a third season, middle-of-the-season episode. And I'm like, "No, you gotta go back to the very beginning of the idea" [...] and just kind of step the audience through the idea and introduce them. Even though it seems like old hat to you, and you're like "well that's boring", but that's what the audience wants. Tell them a story. Who are they, these characters? Why should I like them? Don't be so ironic or high-concept-y."
"When I was a kid I spent a lot of time playing with the artisticly rooted pieces of junk that George was selling me. My wife Lauren did the same the only difference was her junk was pink and had combable hair. Either way these toys were far from junk, in fact they were our lives. Everyday we would make up characters, worlds, and adventures for them. Lauren's My Little Pony world was no less valid than My Little Star Wars world.So imagine little Lauren's surprise when she heard there was going to be a cartoon of her favorite toy! Imagine her dissapointment when the cartoon didn't live up to the world she had created in her head. Maybe she wouldn't have been so upset if she realized that cartoon was only bad because it was produced by a bunch of dudes who couldn't believe they were working on My Little Pony, uggggh. Imagine if they let HER make it, she knows why girls like Pony, she knows what will make it fun and cool.Now imagine 30 years later in some crazy cosmic coincidence she actually does get a get a chance to finally bring that world she's had in her head since she was a little kid to life! Maybe just maybe if she can traverse the waters of notes, schedules, and executives she can finally inject a little a artistic integrity and creative vision into it and make a MLP that girls will actually really like.Heck I even like it now and I hated that lame Pony junk, it wasn't cool like my Star Wars junk."
"When [Powerpuff Girls] was tested, everyone hated it. There were 11-year-old boys telling me I should be fired and it was the worst cartoon they've ever seen in their life."
"What a lot of people have found out about Powerpuff Girls is initially they just think it's this little girl thing that's lame like My Little Pony or whatever. Then they watch it and they’re like "Wait a minute, this is really funny, and this is really good, and it's actually, you know, entertaining.""
"I didn’t know that people could be bigoted even as they were smiling at you. It’s hard to understand when you see people saying that they love you, but they’re afraid of you at the same time."
"At some point, political pragmatism has to reckon with the reality of climate change. You can’t negotiate with science. You can’t meet it halfway."
"People in the penthouse are giving too much to charity? Awesome! But they're also shaping society without our consent. Not awesome! And as long as there are people with so much money in so much power, we'll have no say. The only real solution here is making sure that they're not that rich in the first place."
"This problem is so much bigger than individual bad cops. There is a separate legal and political framework that shields cops from consequences, gives them special rights when defending themselves, and often trains them to fear the communities that they’re supposed to protect."
"Look, I know this seems like the part where I make an impassioned argument for why immigrants are good for America. You know the hits. “This country was built on immigrants. They boost the economy. Rihanna.” That’s all true. But that is not why we have asylum. We have asylum because it is the morally right thing to do. These are people escaping murder and kidnappings and gang violence."
"We eventually transitioned out of shock and into mourning. As Muslim Americans, however, we also had to contend with fear as well. We were held responsible, as a group, for the terrorist attacks or seen as a threat. Suddenly our religion was dangerous and our American-ness called into question. The comedian Hasan Minhaj put it so well in his Netflix special, Homecoming King: On September 11, "everyone in America felt like their country was under attack," he said, but on September 12 and so many nights after that, I felt like my family's love and loyalty for this country was under attack.""
"I often tell people, "If you have a choice between the bottom job and a low management job when you're first starting, take the bottom job because you won't learn as much in the management job". I also tell students, "If you're not curious, you're not going to learn. And if you're not enthusiastic, you won't be noticed". If you're not naturally enthusiastic, pretend to be. It's very infectious."
"Getting older is great, but I think bravery also comes with having a good career and high status. The world has shown me that bravery and honesty tends to be the better route. And I want to set an example for my daughter."
"…We’re starting to have those conversations and it’s messy, because it’s stuff that we haven’t reckoned with, ever…Like, everyone has always known not to grab an butt, or to not say point blank, ‘You’re a woman – you’re not funny.’ But even just 10 years ago, no one would have talked about a cultural problem in comedy."
"…He had always known the situation was messed up, but it took me calling him out. I told him: ‘I’ve been pissed at you. This was terrible and it hurt me and what you did was wrong’…[he did it] because he was afraid, because he was working on a script with these guys. It was bros before hoes."
"People can’t be creative if they feel threatened. You need people saying random weird stuff without feeling their boss will yell at them. And it worked. I think there has been an awakening of compassion, since, a reckoning with privilege."
"You can’t go picking and choosing whether or not to save an animal – where on earth would you stop?"
"One hopes that people realise that there is a need to integrate development and conservation. We need to emphasise that protection of ecology is always beneficial for the present generation and the future one. This is where one needs to replicate the Indian example, where a network of national parks have been created to protect environment. It is not just the laws but their strict implementation that is must."
"I love working on shows where they have the history week to week where the more you watch it, the more interesting it becomes. As you watch it unfold over time, that’s where you see it really flower. That’s my preference when I’m working on something."
"When you're part of a TV writing staff, a big part of the job is coming up with ideas, just all the time, they can be crazy, half-formed ideas, or whole pitches, you're just constantly coming up with things to throw at the wall, and you know that only some of them are going to stick. When you're the head writer, you spend a lot more time judging, choosing, making those calls about which direction to go. You have to change gears really often between being wildly imaginative, open to all possibilities... and then putting on the producer hat and considering what you're really able to accomplish, what's going to work in the long term.... Something can sound great when you first hear it, but then it takes you down a road that's going to turn into a dead end, you have to try and see that coming...."
"If I had any advice to give, it's to be your own toughest critic when you write a spec or pitch -- a great idea goes a long way, but it's important to craft and polish your work so that you're communicating your ideas clearly and concisely, and that they're as entertaining as can be (remember, competition is stiff). And if you're pitching, put yourself in the mind of the producer or executive you're pitching to: figure out how to make your idea specific to the show, yet be inventive -- they'll want to hear something they might not have come up with on their own, that's why they're taking pitches in the first place."
"Usually when I need to name a character, I look around the studio and see who I could hand 15 nano-seconds of fame to."
"You know, I'm not at all against CG. I really admire many films that are made, especially when they have such great design sense to them. I think that's so important, whichever medium. You use a medium for a reason."
"I think if you’re true to yourself then it will have a universality to it, that’s my belief."
"There’s a problem when you write for Hollywood in particular, they only read the dialogue. They call it reading down the middle. They have 10 scripts to read over the weekend, so all the bits that are in block prose, they won’t look at. But that’s the important stuff in the cinema. A cinematic script… they always say that you can watch a good film with the sound down."
"I see the slow metamorphosis into streaming, catch up services supplanting main channels and people watching on a range of devices. There’s limitless opportunity worldwide because optimistic story telling is part of human endeavour."
"The world is your oyster if you’re unafraid to tell your own story and keep it universally appealing. But you have reason to be afraid of making live action children’s drama in Australia if the system is dismantled."
"Remember that your thoughts are the primary cause of everything."
"If you are feeling good , it is because you are thinking good thoughts."
"There is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it, and that truth is this: you deserve all good things life has to offer"
"Ask once, believe you have received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good."
"Be grateful for what you have now. As you begin to think about all the things in your life you are grateful for, you will be amazed at the never ending thoughts that come back to you of more things to be grateful for. You have to make a start, and then the law of attraction will receive those grateful thoughts and give you more just like them."
"Instead of focusing on the world's problems, give your attention and energy to trust, love, abundance, education and peace."
"The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake."
"Your power is in your thoughts, so stay awake. In other words, remember to remember."
"Any screenwriter will tell you that as satisfying and wonderful a career as that is, outside of the people you work with, nobody actually reads what you write. Your writing goes through a process, touched by multiple dozens of people, until it becomes a finished piece of film. As an example on a very simple level, you may write a line of dialog that you absolutely love, but an actor had to speak that line, and music might be there to underscore the line, and the line might be read in a situation where a dozen other things are happening simultaneously. It's all good and the way it is supposed to work, but the overall experience becomes about so much more than the line itself. Writing a book is much more pure than that, and I wanted to experience it."
"The thing is, kids love scary stories. They love dramatic stories. They love that kind of stuff. It’s one of the reasons why I write books now. I’m able to write the kind of stuff I like, whereas in TV I can’t do that anymore."
"I rarely take the characteristics of someone I know and make them a complete fictional character, except maybe with truly minor characters who only play a small role. All of my characters are more like the Frankenstein monster, having been stitched together using multiple real people. The classic advice to any writer is "write what you know". So in order to create believable characters, you have to write about people you know."
"There was no interference, nothing on a creative level, you have the idea, you go for it. And that's what it was like with all the shows made back then, it was that attitude that really created Nickelodeon and made the show as good as it was."
"A script is only the beginning of the process. But with books, what you write is exactly what people read. So as a writer, that's very satisfying."
"I realized that the actors were the last hired and the first fired. There are no facts here in movies and television really, it's all opinions forcibly argued and if you can express your opinion articulately and with force and belief, you can win this, you can do this, and I just loved it."
"I wanted to be an actor. I never wanted to grow up. I never wanted to. I wanted to fly."
"One of the ironies in social climbing is that if you are successful, your children will ultimately belong to a different class from yours. There is something sad in that this was your ambition, yet if you achieve it, you have in a sense alienated yourself from your own children."
"I think I’m somewhat defined by my race for sure, and I’m good with that and I actually want that to be a part. I think that should be fodder for our work — we should use all aspects of ourselves. I’m always trying to find a place where that’s actually an impact on what I’m doing as opposed to going, “Well, we’re all just people and we’re the same.”"
"People treat actors and people in the public eye differently from how they’d treat anybody else in their lives. You would never come up to a stranger, throw your arm around them and say, ‘Hey, buddy, lemme get this picture.’ You think it’s OK to do that?"
"This [Racism] is a systemic, institutionalized problem that we are all fully aware of."
"I hope to use my ‘celebrity’ to motivate people and contribute to moving our global society back from the brink. I am surprised environment is not at the top of the agenda. What is more important than food and clean air? We need a big push."
"No War Остановите войну, не верьте пропаганде, здесь вам врут. [Stop the war, don't believe the propaganda, here you are being lied to.] Russians against war"
"What is happening in Ukraine is a crime. Russia is an aggressor country and the responsibility for this aggression rests on the conscience of only one person. That person is Vladimir Putin. My father is Ukrainian, my mother is Russian, and they've never been enemies. This necklace I'm wearing is a symbol of the fact that Russia must immediately end this fratricidal war and our fraternal peoples will still be able to reconcile. Unfortunately, I've spent the last few years working for Channel One, doing Kremlin propaganda, and I'm very ashamed of this. Ashamed that I allowed lies to be broadcast from TV screens. Ashamed that I allowed others to zombify Russian people. We were silent in 2014 when all this started. We didn't protest when the Kremlin poisoned Navalny. We just silently watched this inhuman regime at work. And now the whole world has turned its back on us. And the next 10 generations won't wash away the stain of this fratricidal war. We Russians are thinking and intelligent people. It's in our power alone to stop all this madness. Go protest. Don't be afraid of anything. They can't lock us all away."
"Russia is mired in cynicism. On state TV channels from morning to evening they discuss whose rocket exploded at the Kramatorsk railway station, how the corpses in Bucha wiggled their fingers and got up ...."
"The propaganda machine leads the Russian people away from the essence, clouds their minds and replaces concepts. Instead of words of condolence, it broadcasts about fakes. Instead of morality, it plunges society into chaos."
"The truth is that Russia is an aggressor country. Treacherously attacked an independent state at night. This means that the responsibility for today's explosion in Kramatorsk and for the war crimes in Bucha lies solely with her. And no one else. Ukrainians are defending their native land by all available means. So they will always be right."
"The main goal that unites all of humanity now is to stop this merciless war. Don't argue about what's fake and what's true. Just do not succumb to negative informational influence. Turn off the TV and remember the main thing.."
"In the minds of Russians, there had to be an image that all Americans were L.G.B.T. supporters who killed Black people and abused adopted children from Russia."
"I am brave man, I like to try."
"“I’m not going to reduce myself just to make other people feel comfortable."
"Dineo Ranaka on her never-say-die hustler spirit ( 22 May 2019) by Kemong Mopedi retrieved 19 July 2022"
"The root of all sanity and serenity, where womanhood is concerned, is in the circle of queens and the quality of queens you keep in your life.”"
"Try your best to not lose sleep or joy over things or situations that aren’t in your immediate control"
"Live light. Laugh long. Love the ones you’re with and serve the ones you love."
"DINEO RANAKA UNPLUGS WITH HER BEST-FRIEND AT KAGGA KAMMA by Cardova retrieved 19 July 2022"
"Dineo Ranaka on her never-say-die hustler spirit ( 22 May 2019) by Kemong Mopedi"
"DINEO RANAKA UNPLUGS WITH HER BEST-FRIEND AT KAGGA KAMMA by Cardova"
"It's all perspective. Your version of normal and my version of normal is different. My kids' version of normal is incredibly different. So it's perspective. You try to surround them with diversity. We try to surround ourselves with all aspects of life and try not to stay in our bubble, but it's hard. It is really hard! And anyone who tells you otherwise is lying."
"I very much have always felt like an American… People were like, ‘Oh, you’re so Eastern European.’ I was like, ‘I’m so L.A.!"
"I turned to my kids and I was like, ‘You are half-Ukrainian, half-American!’ I literally was like, ‘Look, you!’ And my kids were like, ‘Yeah mom, I get it.’ And I was like, ‘No! You are Ukrainian and American.’ I was like, ‘You are half-Iowa, half-Ukraine.’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, I get it. It’s been irrelevant to me that I come from Ukraine. It never mattered. So much so that I’ve always said I’m Russian, right? Like I’ve always been, ‘I’m from Russia’ for a multitude of reasons…"
"I don’t think that we need to consider the people of Russia an enemy. I do really want to emphasize that. I don’t think that that’s being said enough in the press. I think that there’s now ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ mentality. And I don’t want people to conflate the two problems that are happening. I don’t think it’s the people of Russia… I do encourage people to look at it from the perspective of, ‘It’s the people in power, not the people themselves’."
"And I also don’t want people to get discouraged and conflate different issues in the world, and I don’t want people to compare. I think that one thing that’s happening a little bit that I’ve noticed is people are like, ‘Why is everybody paying attention to this problem, but nobody paid attention to all these other issues that have been happening?’ And I don’t want people to conflate. Like everyone, people just to focus on what is at hand right now and right now this issue can get incredibly catastrophic for the rest of the world – not just for that part of the world, and I don’t want people to lose sight of that."
"I think anyone who at 26 is going to attempt to be a professional ballerina is going to physically kill themselves. Baths are what I looked forward to, every single night! And a glass of wine!"
"From every film you learn something new, but from my experience you never know what film is going to open what doors, and it always happens when you least expect it."
"I wanted to quit the industry when I was eighteen and finish '70's', finish my contract on the show and go to college because I was pretty convinced that after '70's and after being on a show for eight years that I would be very much pigeonholed for something specific that I didn't want to be a part of anymore. So my attempt at college failed miserably and I dropped out and decided that this is what I wanted to do for a living. When I made that decision I had to convince myself to disassociate myself from the industry, if that makes any sense, to be who I am and to have this just be what I do and that the paths could never cross. If they did then I think that given after '70's it was like a good year of just pure rejection. So if I didn't disassociate myself from what I did I would probably go through depression, I would assume, or go through some hard times. But I didn't and I always had some other things that were more important to me. I had family that was more important. I had my life that was more important. I had hobbies that were more important and this was just my job."
"I didn't fail out. I dropped out. I did not fail. I was actually a pretty good student. My problem was that I didn't know what I wanted to study. What was I going to go in? Undecided? I took a class on Zionist theory. I took classes that interested me, that weren't necessarily for a specific degree. Then I realized and spoke to my parents and I said, 'I do love what I do and I want to pursue it.' They were like, 'Oh, why don't you just drop out.'"
"I would say that by third grade I spoke pretty fluent English. I don't remember much of second grade. I've said this before. I was not a traumatized kid, by any means with the way that this might come out, but I pretty much blocked out all of second grade in the states. I'm guessing it was because it was hard and my parents said that I came home crying every night but I don't remember it. I think it was rough because I just didn't know where I was and I didn't get the culture. I didn't get the people. I'll be honest, I never...I met an African American person for the first time in my life when I was seven. I didn't know they existed. I didn't know there were people of a different color. I didn't know people with red hair existed. It wasn't even...it wasn't because I wasn't taught that in school but I think it just wasn't where I grew up. So much of it was, forget the language barrier, just a culture shock. I think adapting to the culture was much harder than actually learning English."
"Comedy is very hard and I don't know if it's where my heart necessarily is but doing comedy is one of those things where if something is funny right now does not necessarily mean it's going to sustain itself for a year in production and be funny when the movie comes out and that to me is the hardest thing. I love playing different characters and I love doing fun things and I love to entertain people, whether that be in a comedy or a drama. If I get you to laugh or I get you to cry I'm super stoked, as morbid as that might sound."
"The desire to be perfect. Women innately have this weird thing where they try to have a perfect persona—to look perfect, be perfect, act perfect, have their kids look a certain way. Women put so much pressure on themselves."
"I don’t wear makeup. I don’t wash my hair every day. It’s not something that I associate with myself. I commend women who wake up 30, 40 minutes early to put on eyeliner. I think it’s beautiful. I’m just not that person. So to go to a shoot and have my makeup artist put on face cream and send me off to do a photo, I was like, “Well, this makes life easy.”"
"Sadly, in any industry and in any work-related environment, females always strive to achieve a certain amount of perfection, whether that be skinny or pretty. It's a constant, in our society."
"You want to be honest with a character and play it truthfully, and you want to be genuine with your character."
"That is the biggest form of bullying ever, the paparazzi. Printing lies, making accusations, it's just bullying."
"I feel like every role you take, there's a part of you that obviously feels like you can do it. I don't know if perfect is the right word because I don't believe in perfection. I don't think it exists."
"People have interpretations of what you're supposed to be like. If you're unattractive and overweight, you must have a great personality. If you're attractive, then you must not be the nicest person. People are always taken aback that I'm easygoing but not necessarily stupid."
"I think there will always be a double standard between males and females, so I think that an actress is more likely to protect her public persona, so to speak, than an actor would be."
"There was an energy in that building — of honesty, of truth-telling, of freedom, and that was what that show was, Because it is my journey and my story, where I pick and choose to tell it is totally up to me."
"So often times, we do it to ourselves. But, I just can’t. Understand, I love my sister. However, when you know you’re being fed the wrong food, you must say, ‘I can’t chew this, y’all."
"Inequality is devastating and it's extreme."
"And stop hiding behind what you call is negative comments…what people are beginning to do is see you for who you are."
"What you’re saying to the community is, as Black women, you’re devalued. And if you stand up and you make a stand and you say We need equality and we have to say what’s right and what’s fair."
"Oftentimes, we get scared because we’re too afraid to lose something, We’re too afraid to lose the mortgage payment...too afraid to lose our stuff, so we’ll just go along to get along. Be unafraid, even if [you have to] stand alone. That’s what has to happen. Because when you look in the mirror, you’ve got to be OK with the one looking back at you."
"I abused and betrayed the trust of another sibling, my sister, my blood. I’m sorry, Mo’Nique. I’m sorry."
"I fought hard for her to get that job. I wanted her to get that job. And she was paid her money. She was paid the money for the budget that we had."
"All shows have a lifespan. You start to run out of stories. You start to run out of a new vision. It is very hard to sustain something too long and it'll become detrimental when you do. These have lifespans, I believe."
"I was at the movies yesterday, and before the movie started they had this long ad where they were trying to say … "Don't download things illegally" et cetera. And … they were like, "You wouldn't steal a purse, would you? You wouldn't think of stealing a car." And I was thinking about it … and I was like, "You know what? I would steal a car if it was as easy as, like, touching the car, and then 30 seconds later I own the car." And, like, I would steal a car if … [even though I stole] the car, the person who owned the car got to keep the car. And I would also steal a car if no one I had ever met had ever bought a car before in their whole lives."
"When you’re starting out [as a television writer], mostly it’s terrifying because you think you could get fired and then never get hired again. If you see some of the statistics for women of color on writing staffs, you’ll see that even if there’s parity, it’s so hard to get promoted and stay on a show. A whopping majority of upper-level writers are still white men. You see a lot of people of color in the younger ranks, but it’s hard to move up."
"I think there’s been a tendency for people to conflate my characters with my personality. … I wrote 24 episodes of The Office. That’s more than any other person on The Office, but no one can really picture me sitting and doing the hard work of writing the episodes."
"I could really relate to [Never Have I Ever], more than anything else that I’ve ever written. I was personally proud of it, but didn’t know how it would be received. And to this day, I think it’s my biggest success in terms of how many people it reached and how popular it was on Netflix. I learned a lesson from it, which is not to be cynical about the public."
"I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. …. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character."
"I'm going to gently assume that if you're reading this book, you are a little bit of a nerd, or perhaps you're a man whose nerd girlfriend is taking a long time in the bathroom and you can't figure out how to turn on her television."
"I’m surprised when I remember that, physically, I resemble most women in this country. In the United States, a woman who is 5 feet 4 inches and a size 10 is probably more common than virtually any other body type. But somehow when she is on-screen it’s shocking to people, almost as shocking as seeing a married couple on TV where the man and woman are roughly the same age."
"If I have any skill at all, it's the ability to come up with ideas that get people talking. With so many choices out there for viewers, you've got to get people talking about your show or you have no chance at all."
"“[Berkeley, Professor Hubert Dreyfus] always contended … for very philosophical and biological reasons … [AI was] never going to be able to do what a human being could do, but they could achieve mediocrity as a simulation.”"
"Certainly in the early days when I was doing a lot of shows for Fox and I was working with my friend Mike Darnell, we would sit there and try to think of crazy ideas and we would try to warm up each other. And then whenever we thought we'd have something that could be produced into a television show, we'd always say, well, can we really put that on television? And then when we would say that, we said, now we have to put it on television. Because if it was questionable about whether or not it was appropriate for viewers, then we knew we had a chance to be a success."
"I wouldn't want to do a show that looked and smelled just like another show. So you really have to force yourself to think hard about what's like what hasn't been seen, what hasn't been done. Particularly for network, because on cable there's a little, and I haven't really done much cable at all, only two or three series, but there's a luxury there where if your show fails, nobody really notices."
"“We did a whole send-out when she died, we did a tribute to Magic at the end of one of the episodes and stuff,” Fleiss recalls. “So I’ve always had Rottweilers with me on the sets. I have one now. They’re great dogs.”"
"When I found out how inaccurately she was portrayed on [other] series, that was a driving force."
"We really had to make sure that we did that accurately because we didn’t want anyone walking away saying ‘Nah, that isn’t how it was. I don’t know if I, I don’t believe this"
"No shortcuts were taken here from the amount of showing the love story to then the redemption and showing the violence"
"There was a lot of different wonderful elements that we had to tackle and we did. I just thank my amazing cast for coming in and leaving their egos at the door and my crew for working so very hard."
"To see how they make someone comfortable enough to confess with their body language, that was the one thing that was the most interesting to me, was how you can tell when the detective goes in for ‘the kill.’ When they (the detective) get comfortable with someone and make them feel like they’re a friend."
"In Missing, we just kind of caught criminals. We would get them, arrest them, and turn them over. But hosting The Interrogation Room, going behind the scenes, showing how they build a case, how they get confessions, that was all totally new."
"I loved watching some 48 Hours, some Dateline, I love a good whodunit just like everybody else does! Just trying to figure out how that simple piece of hair, or blood drop, or footprint can help solve a crime."
"I think that by her being a woman director, it just brought so much,"
"I mean, she understood the story. quated by (Tonesa Welch)"
"Smallwood told CNN Fox has “so many skill sets that contribute to the success of any project.”"
"Her work ethic is incredible"
"Nobody can outwork her in the industry."
"A lot of people will say don't compare, but I have never met anybody that doesn't – it's just a normal human thing that we do."
"Especially being a young Black girl, we are often overlooked. We don't get the respect that we should get when it comes to our hard work and changing the narrative. At times you can feel it and you just have to remember what you bring to the table. At some point, you can't care what other people think. All we can do is live for ourselves because we are the only people that we know at the end of the day."
"There is no limit to what you can reach and what you can strive for."
"I am so blessed to be a part of a generation like this because we are constantly raising the bar and pushing the boundaries of what we can do. Keep striving to do what you wanna do – it's your life."
"I love doing stand-up. ... That's where I feel like I can be free."
"Oh, shoot. That's right. I forgot. I'm a black, lesbian female, and they aren't ready for this yet."
"But they weren't ready to see a black woman who happens to be a lesbian also making fun of the president."
"I feel like with as much blood of my ancestors that has been shed to build this country, this is my country. I feel like I have more of a right here than anyone else."
"I hope we can get to a place where it’s normal to say, “Yeah, my wife and I,” and it’s not, “oh my god!” Which is why it’s important to have representation."
"If your family isn’t supportive, you're going to find somebody who would be that surrogate parent who will love you and take care of you. You’ll make family. I did. Know that there’s places and people who will love you—and you can and you will have an amazing life."
"When we decided to have the series [Molly of Denali] highlight Alaska Native culture, we knew that this was not our story to tell. The production team at GBH reached out to members of the Alaska Native community who graciously agreed to be our collaborators to ensure that we were accurately portraying that culture."
"A highlight for me in working on this special was the chance to learn more about Molly’s Gwich’in heritage both in terms of the new relatives she meets and her encounter with parts of the culture that are uniquely special, like the porcupine caribou herd. It was especially exciting to see the herd come to life through Atomic’s incredible animation."
"African women are beautiful in every unique way, no matter their skin tone, whether of dark or light hues. We are unique and strong and beautiful and our differences are worth celebrating]."
"I’ve been doing "Breakfast Thoughts", and I guess my Breakfast Thought at the moment is, uh, is "the moment." Every person who is seeing me now — some are seeing me within months of my saying this, some are likely to see this years after I have said this, but whenever all of you are seeing it — that will be the moment you’re seeing it — as this is the moment I’m saying it. And what that means to me is: living in the moment. The moment between past and present, or present and past. The moment between after and next, the hammock in the middle of after and next. The moment. Treasure it. Use it with love."
"Well, I made it. I am 100 years old today. I wake up every morning grateful to be alive. Reaching my own personal centennial is cause for a bit of reflection on my first century — and on what the next century will bring for the people and country I love. To be honest, I’m a bit worried that I may be in better shape than our democracy is."
"I was deeply troubled by the attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — by supporters of former President Donald Trump attempting to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Those concerns have only grown with every revelation about just how far Mr. Trump was willing to go to stay in office after being rejected by voters — and about his ongoing efforts to install loyalists in positions with the power to sway future elections."
"I don’t take the threat of authoritarianism lightly. As a young man, I dropped out of college when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. I flew more than 50 missions in a B-17 bomber to defeat Fascism consuming Europe. I am a flag-waving believer in truth, justice and the American way, and I don’t understand how so many people who call themselves patriots can support efforts to undermine our democracy and our Constitution. It is alarming. At the same time, I have been moved by the courage of the handful of conservative Republican lawmakers, lawyers and former White House staffers who resisted Mr. Trump’s bullying. They give me hope that Americans can find unexpected common ground with friends and family whose politics differ but who are not willing to sacrifice core democratic principles."
"For all his faults, Archie loved his country and he loved his family, even when they called him out on his ignorance and bigotries. If Archie had been around 50 years later, he probably would have watched Fox News. He probably would have been a Trump voter. But I think that the sight of the American flag being used to attack Capitol Police would have sickened him. I hope that the resolve shown by Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and their commitment to exposing the truth, would have won his respect."
"It is remarkable to consider that television — the medium for which I am most well-known — did not even exist when I was born, in 1922. The internet came along decades later, and then social media. We have seen that each of these technologies can be put to destructive use — spreading lies, sowing hatred and creating the conditions for authoritarianism to take root. But that is not the whole story. Innovative technologies create new ways for us to express ourselves, and, I hope, will allow humanity to learn more about itself and better understand one another’s ideas, failures and achievements."
"I often feel disheartened by the direction that our politics, courts and culture are taking. But I do not lose faith in our country or its future. I remind myself how far we have come."
"Reaching this birthday with my health and wits mostly intact is a privilege. Approaching it with loving family, friends and creative collaborators to share my days has filled me with a gratitude I can hardly express. This is our century, dear reader, yours and mine. Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future."
"I was raised to have great parents, and I was raised to believe that I had power, as big or small as it was. It was there and it was to be utilized. That’s something that I want a lot of women to get the opportunity to feel."
"When you realize that every breath is a gift from God. When you realize how small you are, but how much he loved you. That he, Jesus, would die, the son of God .."
"The three things I said when I came out of school were I want to work consistently, I want to do good work and I want to be paid fairly, and that's happened"
"1.Don't settle for a life that is less than you deserve.2.Your dreams are worth pursuing, no matter how big they may seem."
"15 Aug 2022 — I am Queen of the most powerful nation in the world! And my entire family is gone! Have I not given everything?"
"What if the powerful can use ‘information abundance’ to find new ways of stifling you, flipping the ideal of freedom of speech to crush dissent, while always leaving enough anonymity to be able to claim deniability?"
"But if the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts? Why would you want them if they tell you that your children will be poorer than you? That all versions of the future are unpromising? And why should you trust the purveyors of facts – the media and academics, think tanks, statesmen? And so the politician who makes a big show of rejecting facts, who validates the pleasure of spouting nonsense, who indulges in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence, from glum reality, becomes attractive. That enough Americans could vote for someone like Donald Trump, a man with so little regard for making sense, whose many contradictory messages never add up to any very stable meaning, was partly possible because voters felt they weren’t invested in any larger evidence-based future. Indeed, in his very incoherence lies the pleasure. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s OK. The joy of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense."
"Conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audience with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov called ‘white jamming’."
"This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge. What’s unsettling isn’t so much that ‘they’ know something about me that I considered private, hidden… more disconcerting is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that I’m not who I think I am – one’s complete dissipation into data that is now being manipulated by someone else."
"Forty years have passed since my parents were pursued by the KGB for pursuing the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted. Today, the world they hoped for, in which censorship would fall like the Berlin Wall, can seem much closer: we live in what academics call an era of ‘information abundance’. But the assumptions that underlay the struggles for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century – between citizens armed with truth and information and regimes with their censors and secret police – have been turned upside down. We now have more information than ever before, but it hasn’t brought only the benefits we expected."
"I don’t enjoy the personality side of being an actor. I don’t understand why it’s expected I’ll be scintillating on a talkshow."
"I’m stubborn and lacking in confidence, which is a terrible combination. I don’t want to put anything out that I don’t think is excellent."
"I’m always trying to cut lines in scenes. I like films that pose the big questions, then leave it to the audience"
"You find so much empathy in novels, you know, because there you are putting yourself into somebody else's point of view, and I've always been a big reader. When a movie can connect with someone, and they feel seen or feel heard, or a novel can change somebody's life, or a piece of music-- an album-- can change someone's life. And I've had all that happen to me. And that's the power of good art, I think."
"I think instinct is your most powerful tool that you have as an actor. Nothing must be predetermined. So therefore, you mustn't have a plan about how you're gonna play stuff. And I love that. It's like being buffeted by the wind and being buffeted by emotion."
"I love it when it becomes an immersive experience. I love getting lost in it. In the early days, that was with theater. It felt kind of extraordinary that with just the power of will and a couple of lights and a good script, we were creating this world. And so, it's that's kind of addictive, when it works well."
"The majority of my buddies are not in the business. I also love not working. And I think for me a lot of research as an actor is just fucking living, and, you know, having a normal life doing regular things and just being able to observe, and be, in that sort of lovely flow of humanity. If you can’t do that because you’re going from film festival to movie set to promotions…I mean that’s The Bubble. I’m not saying that makes you any better or less as an actor, but it’s just a world that I couldn’t exist in. I find it would be very limiting on what you can experience as a human being, you know?"
"I come from theater, and I love acting with my body. You get to do that an awful lot in theater, but you don’t get to do it as much in film because film is about the close-up generally. And theater is always by necessity in a wide shot."
"Well, first of all, it's imperative not to judge the character. Because then you've lost as a performer. You have to try and understand [them]. You have to be like a kind of emotional detective. But your job primarily is to define the truth in the character to try and portray them in a truthful way."
"Method is like a euphemism. We all have a method to get to the final result. And whatever that method is, it's personal and unique to each actor. It's become sort of confused, I think, with the Stanislavski approach. But every actor has their own individual method."
"Inevitably, if you play a character for a long time, and I was researching him for six months, then shooting it for however long that was.. And you're playing them 18 hours a day every day. By osmosis, you're exchanging atoms, You become consumed or immersed [by it], that's just the way it is."
"But to clarify the thing about interviews, I love talking about the movie, I love talking about music and books and art. I'm not a huge fan of talking about myself. And I don't, and I don't think anyone really is, but I fully believe in this movie, and I love promoting it. So I'm very comfortable with all of that. And in terms of, you know, how it changes your life or anything like that, or changes how people perceive you that that hasn't changed for me, you know, my life has been exactly the same as it always was."
"You have to move faster and work faster but I also enjoy that. When you’re confident in the material and hopefully confident in the character then you can just go at a pace."
"I feel like I’m entering a different phase of my life. I don’t mind embracing it. I had a really good time in my 20s and 30s. Now I’m ready for a bit more… decorum, I guess? A bit more moderation? Still enjoying being a young man, but looking over the wall into the other side, you know?"
"There’s a wealth of stuff out there and I will read it all. I am never, ever going to understand quantum mechanics, no matter how hard or how many times people try to explain it to me. There’s 0.0001 per cent of the population on the planet who have the brainpower to understand that."
"I know everyone says this, but you never go into making a film thinking about awards. That's not what we do. It's impossible to make a film that way."
"But, when a film connects with audiences like this particular one has in a way that none of us could have anticipated... it's hugely flattering and hugely humbling and it's lovely to see that."
"I don’t really partake. I don’t go out. I’m just at home mostly, or with my friends, unless I have a film to promote. I don’t like being photographed by people. I find that offensive."
"I was a Chris Nolan fan. That’s how I was when I met him for the first time … So, it feels absurd that I’ve been in six of his films."
"We made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb, and for better or for worse, we’re all living in Oppenheimer’s world. So I would really like to dedicate this to the peacemakers everywhere."
"The Dalai Lama was little known, because he had never traveled abroad and was not yet a Nobel Prize winner, but he opened all the doors for me and I was able to film all the greats Tibetan masters, rinpothes and toulkus who had fled with him."
"At that time, the Dalai Lama was much more accessible, I had breakfast with him and spend long moments alone with him."
"Hopefully, more Americans will also come to know the Donald Trump I know – caring, compassionate, and delivering justice with humanity for all Americans."
"Trans visibility day, whatever the hell that means, March 31st is the day that someone designated, I believe, in 2009 for this day. It happened to coincide with Easter this year, and no one over there had the idea that, I don’t know, maybe the holiest day on the Christian calendar, perhaps we could just move Trans Visibility Day? April Fool’s Day would be a good day for that, in my opinion."
"We have lawsuits in 81 states right now."
"They may not have as many followers or subscribers as you do, but they know the space"
"Humble yourself to the experience, and you might find that you could be an amazing actor with a million followers."
"I have seen these young ladies sitting on the make-up chair with their phones while the make-up person is trying to put their character together."
"You are disrespecting the person who is assisting you, and those million people do not know your character"
"I think that a lot of people misunderstand what self-love is about. Because it is labelled diva, let's call it that but own it and love it. If I can bring the diva out of you and help you celebrate yourself on a daily basis, then that is what it is about. It is about honouring yourself"
"I am one of only a handful of actors in this country who are not just talented, but have taken the trouble to learn the best ways of making any role they are cast in as real as it can be for the viewers"
"Be prepared to go on a roller coaster ride if you are looking to start up. It's one of the best journeys you will take in your life because you will learn things you never even knew you needed to know and you will meet the most amazing people while you are at it. You will find strength you never knew you had. So, DO IT"
"I had been playing what I thought was a traditional role of a wife and I was miserable. Talking about this was very important because we created a marriage that made sense to us."
"The two are so different and both require work and effort. I love being a mom. My daughter is a joy and time spent with her is memorable. I have learnt about myself over the years, good and bad, and being conscious about each of these roles is important to me"
"We wanted to try and do things slightly differently in that we wanted to own the content which we were producing, which isn't always the case in South Africa"
"Starting an online TV station was the best way we thought we could do what we love, while growing as well"
"We have a feature film, Love and Kwaito that we filmed in 2016 that was the official selection for the Joburg Film Festival and we are currently working on our second one to be filmed in September 2017"
"My depression has been both chemical and emotional, and on and off, I have also dealt with anxiety...but I know my triggers now, I can feel myself drawing in, and over the years I know how to mitigate against it lasting too long"
"Money has been a difficult issue in our marriage in the past. There have been times when we were both out of work, or when one of us didn't have money. It is the nature of our industry. We had to learn to be gentle with each other, and to keep reminding ourselves that we didn't get married because of money, but to make a life together"
"It is important to me as Tshepo's wife, to make him comfortable during periods when he isn't working, and to be mature enough to manage my expectations of him"
"You have to be able to live with uncertainty. You really have to dig in and persist because every deal gets tough. But to me it is all about the people that I am working with. I didn’t set this up to work with people I don’t want to work with. I set it up to work with people that I want to work with.”"
"Authenticity is crucial - you need to embody the values and behaviours that you want your business to espouse. I believe you have to be 'present' and visible. Your team needs to know you're in and that they have your support. You should be there for them in a crisis rather than create a culture of blame and fear. You cannot overestimate the importance of COMMUNICATION. Most people don't communicate anywhere near enough."
"Deal with the matter swiftly and decisively. Any prevarication only makes the crisis bigger, particularly once the press get hold of it."
"Life's too short not to do something you love doing and if you love your job you will probably do it well."
"Being part of a ‘club’ or network is something women need to get serious about. Networks aren’t just a ‘nice to have.’ They offer support – critical no matter what level you’re at – and they also make businesses sense."
"Once you are in a job you can build a team around you that will complement your skills."
"When in doubt just smile and smile and say nothing."
"Think about how to stand out as a candidate in your own right, not just a 'woman' coming through on the 'woman on boards' agenda – how to compete with the best men out there without making it about gender."
"Women often hold themselves back because they don't think they tick all the boxes. You need to be self aware enough to realise whether those boxes actually all need ticking – you will always learn a lot on the job."
"“I never felt that there was any barrier to me as a woman, and I always felt that there were people encouraging me.”"
""Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.”"
"“Don’t circumscribe your own ambition – go for it – you might not get it – but go for it.”"
"If you force yourself to be a square peg in a round hole you’re never going to be that happy."
""Life is too short to push yourself to do jobs you think you ought to – just do jobs that make you happy, because if you’re happy the likelihood is you will do your job well and be successful.”"
""There’s never a right or wrong time to do it – your career will work around you having children.”"
"“Do I protect my life or my modesty? No contest.”"
"“I am very proud to have created and built Boom Pictures into one of the fastest growing indies by attracting some of the best talent in the industry.""
"“Crises never go away, they only get bigger.""
"This is the job I've been working toward my entire career," said Norman. "To be building a new channel inspired by Oprah Winfrey and backed by Discovery Communications is a challenge I welcome, and I am thrilled to bring their vision for OWN to life."
"Oprah is not the face of the network. She’s the inspiration of the network. The audience is the face of the network."
"“I don't know that I can jump from one fire into the other and really do it justice.""
"One thing I've definitely learned from Oprah is that you just have to stay completely focused: This is what our mission is. This is what our vision is. This is how we are going to judge ourselves at the end of the day."
"What's so interesting to me is really finding a way to tell fresh, new stories."
"Good people win and that good work is rewarded."
"“What I love to be able to bring to what I do is part creativity, business, experience, innovation and curiosity, and push that forward into hopefully finding something new.”"
"“Now, because of social media, every player has a platform and they’re seeing what their influence can be.”"
"“Everyone can have their own path and has their own possibilities. So, what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another.”"
"“We all want to be seen, heard, and understood. And when someone sees you and can understand your experience, it’s a very powerful thing. And I think that was one of the things that I was able to bring to the brand… For me to have had the success that I did, and for that success to have been rooted in Black culture, I think was really impactful for a lot of people.”"
"Stories are the ways we make sense of ourselves and learn about others. At its heart, storytelling is all about building connections through sharing and listening. When we share our experiences, we make ourselves vulnerable — and when we listen, we create space for empathy and understanding."
"We live in a world of IP, where the safest thing to do is reboot something that has an audience. I wanted to prove to myself I wasn’t a one-trick pony. It’s harder than it’s ever been to get something made that’s not based on a previous movie or comic book or video game. Every generation deserves its own stories, instead of just the stories of their grandparents."
"It’s such a special feeling, and I think that every actor in their life dreams to have content or shows that make people wanna go back for more."
"I’m sure every actor has that moment where, when they are in the environment, they wonder: What would my Oscar speech be? What would my Emmy speech be? You watch the Emmys and you daydream, and you see yourself standing there saying something. Then you start thinking about who you’d thank and who you wouldn’t thank."
"There was a longing inside of me that just wanted to play with this thing. I didn’t know how to articulate it. I didn’t even know I could study it."
"Everything begins with yourself. You are the product. Actors, sports players — You’re a product. My physical is the product and I have to manipulate the self to achieve certain things; to act, to perform, to MC, etc. I have to mould this product. It begins there."
"I’m a product that’s there to translate narratives, stories, and bring characters to the fold. Human journeys — their triumphs, weaknesses, losses, and wins."
"We met her and she allowed us to speak to women about their lives and challenges. I decided to create a drama because I don’t think that there is a human being who wakes up and decide to be a prostitute"
"What I like about the story is that this is the honest portrayal of sex workers and their lives"
"But I am happy that black people are telling black stories though they are controlled in how they should tell them."
"“I have a lot of friends who are writers and they want to tell amazing black stories, but they can’t because they are not allowed to. There is a variety of stories to tell but there is no platform and that’s frustrating"
"I’m not my children’s regular friend; I am their mom first. But they can come to me for anything. That’s the kind of mom Leruo has in the story. So that’s the similarity between me and Moretlo."
"To be held in esteem by other people is, for me, a humbling experience."
"I grew up in a time where these things begin in childhood—your grandparents, aunts, uncles, your own parents, the teachers in your classrooms"
"There was something about going through a pledge period with other young women who you really didn't know very well"
"Well, you can respect people. But can you depend on that person? Can you trust that person? And can you be depended upon and can you show up?"
"It's not just about what other people do. It's about you, too."
"in your own thought, you create opportunities and obstacles"
"there's nothing noble about keeping one's self small"
"fame and fortune must be corrupting"
"In mothering, I didn’t think about myself as being a Black mother. I’m a mother"
"I didn’t think about my children being Black children; I think of my children being children"
"The ethnicity is obvious — it’s in our food, it’s in the music we listen to, it’s in the books we read, it’s in the way we live, it’s in the company we keep and the dances that we do"
"I know who I am"
"inner reality creates the outer form"
"The internet has given a lot of anonymous people a very loud voice"
"So I got diagnosed with diabetes about 10 years ago. And so I started growing fresh vegetables. I only eat my vegetables"
"I work out lifting heavier weights because that’s, you know, that’s what the scientists say, really help you burn the sugar before you burn the fat and I’ve gotten control over my diabetes"
"I feel like Dave freed the slaves. The comedians, we were slaves to PC [politically correct] culture and he just, you know, as an artist he’s Van Gogh. Cut his ear off, he’s trying to tell us it’s OK. I just feel like he’s saying, ‘All that I have, I’m not afraid to lose it for the sake of freedom of speech. You can’t edit yourself. Comedians, we’re like…Mercedes makes a great car. But they gotta crash a lot of them before they perfect it"
"I can’t speak about the content of the show but what I say is, there is a bigger conversation we need to have. Someone needs to look us in the eye and say, ‘You’re no longer free in this country. You’re not free to say what you want, you say what we want you to say. Otherwise we will cancel you.’ That’s the discussion we should have"
"In this particular time, the conversation around art and commerce is one that is very relevant.And having that conversation around the expectation of that relationship, what that relationship looks like, and the execution of trying to exist in that relationship, I think, is something that a lot of people can find relevance in and feels universal, just with existing in a capitalistic society.And as it continues to get more capitalistic, seeing how that affects art and the people that are trying to make it."
"I think there’s something very beautiful and artful about seeing people pursuing their dreams, some of the barriers they face, and what they do to push through that is a very universal journey. And so I hope while they’re laughing, they’re also gleaning the human side of it.And that’s something beautiful: that combination of humor and real grounded emotions"
"Oh, this is a space where I have the most power in any kind of artistic lane that I’ve been able to occupy"
"And that was something that changed my career because it allowed people to see me in ways that they hadn’t before, which was as a full person. You could see that I could write, you could see that I could perform, you could see that I’m funny, you’re seeing the stories that I’m telling you, which are about my life"
"I think it allowed people to see me in a way they hadn’t been able to see me before because I was stepping into lots of characters and not necessarily projecting myself. Stand-up was the art form that I felt really amplified me as Dewayne, the person"
"I think stage presence and recognizing the relationship with the audience have helped me in the sense that I am very conscious that this is art that I want to be consumed by people, and if that is the case, then the people should be in mind when I’m creating art"
"And so I think that has just given me a perspective of elevating my awareness and consciousness of how I want people to perceive it and receive what I’m doing, that I think gives me a greater sense of motivation and information to ground my characters in something that I feel people can actually take away with them"
"If I had a worldview, and I don’t know if I do, but if I did, it’s one that’s intensely humanistic. [That worldview] is that the only thing that matters is family and personal connection, and that’s the only thing that gives life meaning. Religion and gods and beliefs — for me, it all comes down to your brother. And your brother might be the brother in your family, or it might be the guy next to you in the foxhole."
"When you start a show, the plans are not set in stone. They’re really mutable, cocktail napkin sketches."
"Mythologies become exhausting burdens, from a writer’s perspective. If you look deep into The X-Files, which we bring up a lot in the room as something we’re just terrified of, or late in the game with Buffy, as much as I love that show, things get complicated and it’s hard. It becomes less about the fun of why you fell in love with that show, in the first place, and more about servicing all of these storylines."
"I’m not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling. I like to know where the mythology is going and that we’re getting there in [an] exciting, fast-paced way."
"Every so often you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can’t let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn."
"We were really interested in exploring the idea of authority figures getting the public really riled up with xenophobia and racism, but ultimately the most dangerous people are the white dudes standing next to you. We wanted to reflect that story. So, the supervillains are, in a way, a misdirect."
"Animation wasn't so much an imitation of life - it was a punctuation of conversation. We always stayed on the one who was talking. It made for a very simple film that was very clear, and there were no unnecessary things going on all around the edges. If I'm going to say something to you then I'm going to do it with a certain amount of gestures; in-between the times I'm completely still. This was how we managed to get through 120 seconds of footage a day, when most studios were getting through 10 seconds. We'd never move a mouth, we'd change the expression, because people were watching the hands."
"[Responding to the perceived surrealism of Clangers] They're surreal but logical. I have a strong prejudice against fantasy for its own sake. Once one gets to a point beyond where cause and effect mean anything at all, then science fiction becomes science nonsense. Everything that happened was strictly logical according to the laws of physics which happened to apply in that part of the world."
"We would go to the BBC once a year, show them the films we'd made, and they would say, "Yes, lovely, now what are you going to do next?" We would tell them, and they would say, "That sounds fine, we'll mark it in for eighteen months from now", and we would be given praise and encouragement and some money in advance."
"What matters most is the story, and it should never be sacrificed to the method. These days immense quantities of money are spent making something that doesn't call for it. As a result, to raise enough backing, children's films have to be dumbed down for the widest possible market."
"Come to think of it I must have produced some of the clumsiest animation ever to disgrace the television screen, but it didn’t matter. The viewers didn’t notice because they were enjoying the stories."
"That was all, but I was fizzing with excitement. It didn't matter what the picture was of. It didn't matter that Master Ho had stumbled rather than walked… I had done something momentous. I had opened up another dimension to the still picture. I had given it the extra dimension of time. I had made it come to life."
"I was also invited to give a couple of informal seminars to the Animation School at the RCA. These were so informal that they could hardly have been said to happen, but they taught me more than I really wanted to know about the way in which our simple craft had been inflated into a maniac pretentious pseudo-art."
"The films we made were aimed at the Head of Department at the BBC, who was about 57 at the time, and she was a nice lady called Ursula Eason, and very humane and ordinary, and full of fun. If we had studied children in any way, apart from having children, we wouldn't necessarily have succeeded in selling the films, because the woman at the BBC had fairly clear opinions of what she would find acceptable, and these were conditioned in some ways by the fact she was a middle-aged, English (well, Irish actually, if you go all the way back) lady, who was brought up as I was on Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, and Lewis Carroll, and all the sort of 'Founding Fathers' of English Tweeness."
"Being creative, having to do something new, invent something, alter things, in order to show you're still there is a personality fault, basically. I think a lot of people who have done creative things do so because if they don't, they cease to exist. This, I know, is true of myself, and I wouldn't wish it onto other people. There is nothing quite like as frightening as having a wife and six children and a blank piece of paper, which is your next year's feeding, and you have to pull out of the sky your livelihood. The idea of being able to live on one's creativity, where you are dubious of its continuity, is a recipe for terrible anxiety."
"All the way through, if you look at my films, you will see that my animation is very economical, but very powerful. Because, I'm not recreating life, I am illustrating a story and telling a story by an extension of the pen. I'm coming at it from the other direction, and what is the minimum amount of visual delivery that I have to do to get this to appear to be alive, which one has accepted more or less anyway that they're there, and to convey the movements, and it is surprising how much one needn't do, and how much better it is from not doing those things that animation doesn't do well."
"Their [politicians] words and phrases are skillfully chosen to keep us complacent and confident in our fairly comfortable world. We don’t usually notice this because ours is a world in which whether or not the words we are offered are true rarely makes much difference to our lives. But, out in the real world, the way words are used or misused can make the difference between life and death."
"That voice of his was loved by the nation. I mean, if I could've been Oliver Postgate, with that voice, and with his mind, and those wonderful, wonderful stories, I would have given my teeth. He puts his arms round you, figuratively speaking, and says "Look, it's all right. Don't worry. Whatever I'm on about at this moment, there's security here with me." And that's the voice that does it; I had to work to be loved, Oliver Postgate, lucky man, didn't."
"And they [Smallfilms] had a superb ear for creating sound effects that children could easily mimic the moment the programme had finished: just think about the swanny-whistle voices of the Clangers, the beatbox rhythm of Ivor's engine, or the marvellous carousel of just bloody lovely sounds that made up most of Bagpuss […] These are the sounds I hear in my own head when I remember my own childhood, and Oliver Postgate put them there."
"And all of these things, the selection of just the right characters, just the right soundtrack, and just the right tone is an incredibly hard thing to pull off in TV; incredibly hard. You can't fake it, you can't screw up your face and slog your way through it: it only occurs when an innate facet of someone's character is allowed to bleed into the production, giving it a unique personality and resonance all of it's own."