Social Activists

"Our idea, which art in the ether, that cannot be named: Thy vision come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is an abstraction. Give us this day our daily spark and forgive our criticisms, as we forgive those who critique against us. And lead us not into stagnation, but deliver us from ego, for thine is the vision, the power and the glory forever. Amen."

"I love money! Just because it's free doesn't mean I don't like money. And actually I've made more money this way than any distributor said I could possibly make, which isn't much because independent distributors are notoriously without money. So the most money any distributor told me I could possibly hope to make on this film, total, maximum, in my wildest dreams was $50,000, and they said much more realistic would be $10,000 or $25,000 and the biggest advance I was offered, I think, was $20,000 and that's for locking up all the rights."

"I don't think distributors are cheating or evil or anything like that, I just think that the business model is unsustainable so they truly don't have money. There's just not much money in this particular model."

"In ten years I think the [copyright] laws are going to be worse and I also think they are going to be less relevant. I mean, already the difference between the laws and people's behaviour, It's like they're different planets. I'm not hopeful for the laws changing. A lot of other people are, so maybe we will have meaningful copyright reform. I doubt it. I don't think it matters. I think the tools are available for people to create and share culture and they're going to do that and they might be doing it illegaly and at a certain point it's going to be more than the system can handle. I will say that if the power structure as it exists wants to continue they're going to have to reform because it's not sustainable. Copyright law as it is, it's just completely out of touch with human behaviour."

"I am not a copyright reformer. I am a copyright abolitionist."

"♡ Copying is an act of love. Please copy & share."

"You don't deserve to be paid because you choose to do something that somebody else may, or may not, want. If you want to be paid for your work, you negotiate that beforehand. Otherwise I would just be walking around talking. Here I am talking now. "You owe me money", right? … It's up to you whether or not you want to do work with no contract. I think artists do need to do work with no contract, because what we're motivated by is not money. We're motivated by a need to express ourselves and to get our ideas out. That's the motivation. It turns out that when people like it they frequently will support you if you give them a means, but this is not a contract."

"Total box office so far has been $22,350 … that trickles down to $3,000 for me. Which really isn't much, but it's fine. People are seeing the film and they're seeing it the the way it should be seen. I do not feel like the distributors are ripping me off. I feel like this is the model of film distribution and this is the reality of it and fortunately my income is not dependent on it."

"Yes, I know bad bad people can also use the .fla files for dastardly deeds (the dreaded hypothetical “Nazi Porn Version” that always comes up at Q&A’s). Bad bad people can use our shared Language and Technology for evil too, but I’m not going to constipate culture out of fear of imaginary worst-case scenarios. I’m confident much more good will come from this than bad, and that’s motivation enough for me. It’s Free Culture, baby. If programmers can tinker with the Free Software’s source code, artists can tinker with Sita Sings the Blues‘ source files."

"Copying is not theft Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more That's what copying's for. Copying isn't theft If I copy yours, you have it too One for me and one for you That's what copies can do. If I steal your bicycle, You have to take the bus But if I just copy it, There's one for each of us! Making more of a thing That is what we call copying Sharing ideas with everyone That's why copying... ...Is fun!"

"When you shut down neurons to prevent them from transmitting signals, we call that "brain damage." Copyright is brain damage. It's brain damage in the great mind, and it's brain damage in the individual mind."

"The corporations that hold these copyrights are media companies that also control most of the new media that comes out. Estimates vary, but it's said that 98 percent of all culture is unavailable right now because of copyrights. So the reason they hold the copyrights isn't because they want to get paid, it's because they don't want all the old stuff competing with the media stream that they control now."

"I got a DVD in the mail, an animated film titled "Sita Sings the Blues." It was an [sic] version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully filed it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week. Then I was told I must see it. I began. I was enchanted. I was swept away. I was smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. … Paley works entirely in 2-D with strict rules, so that characters remain within their own plane, which overlaps with others. This sounds like a limitation. Actually, it becomes the source of much amusement. Comedy often depends on the device of establishing unbreakable rules and then finding ways to break them. The laughs Paley gets here with 2-D would be the envy of an animator in 3-D. She discovers dimensions where none exist. This is one of the year's best films."

"Aamir Khan is an intelligent actor with an eye for detail. He places the film above every individual or ego."

"He was my hero in Ghulam. After that there was a long gap until Mangal Pandey. In between he did want me for Lagaan. Today, we're very close friends. The equation is different. I remembered how he used to show me to do scenes. He still tells me how to do my scenes."

"In the last two years there was a brief period that he decided to quit the films as it is affecting his personal life in many ways."

"Indian film awards lack credibility."

"It's not important to me... people will see my films if they want to. Also, I cannot deal with so many things, I have bandwidth only for that much."

"I would love to work with Salman. We have a great tuning so if we work together, it will be great fun. But till the time we don't get a good script, a script that excites both of us, we can't work together."

"Certainly we were disappointed. But the thing that really kept us in our spirits was that the entire country was behind us."

"Shammiji is said to be India's answer to Elvis Presley, but I say that Elvis Presley is America's answer to Shammi Kapoor. The mark of a good actor is the belief with which he gives a shot and Shammiji gave his each shot with a strong belief and that makes him a great actor of all times."

"We decided to listen to our patients."

"You won’t find solutions to rural India’s health issues in modern facilities that are far removed. Effective strategies will emerge only when you work with the people."

"[Anderson] is not likely to win, but in a race with such doddering bumblers as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, it is best to not rule anything out."

"I have never interviewed a politician so open to argument and so unafraid of being done in by a reporter."

"After losing three consecutive Republican primaries, Anderson admitted that he expected there to be “some reduction in funds” given to his campaign. Usually contributors are less willing to donate to a candidate who has fared poorly at the polls or who might drop out of the race. But there was no significant fall in contributions for him over the first ten days of April. … “The people giving are not affected by these primaries,” aide Tom Mathews explained to a reporter. “They don’t care if he wins or loses as a Republican contestant.” Upon reaching home, Anderson continued to put the pieces in place for an independent candidacy. The decision was made in the face of the overwhelming conventional wisdom that stated there were too many hurdles for a candidate without an established party starting this late to win."

"Anderson was the first major mainstream political figure to align himself with the independent movement that still exists today in American politics. While destabilization and fragmentation existed long before Anderson, he was the first candidate to give an established, credible non-party outlet for independent and disenchanted voters. Secondly, he was the first candidate to expose how voters would appreciate a new realism in American politics. In the aftermath of 1980, candidates were expected to speak in a more straight-forward manner to the voter than in past campaigns, rather than basing campaigns upon promises that the candidate often knew he had little chance of keeping. Third, he was the first candidate at the national level to expose the residual interest that exists among voters in candidates who are truly different and run against politics-as-usual. Fourth, he set a new standard of honesty in campaigning, which has forced the media and the public to hold candidates more accountable for their actions in campaigns. And lastly, it was the Anderson campaign that gave hope to voters that politics in the post-Watergate era could be more truthful, pure, and honorable. After the election, Anderson kept his promise to retire from public life. Although he did flirt with the idea of forming a permanent centrist third party in 1984, in the end he opted never to seek office again. He has instead moved onto a career in academia, teaching as a guest professor at a series of colleges across the nation."

"A vote for Anderson holds out the possibility of something better from our politics and tells whoever wins that at least this voter wants something better."

"Rep. John Anderson, the Illinois Republican, has so far shown himself to be the candidate most qualified to be president."

"He's the smartest guy in Congress, but he insists on voting his conscience instead of party."

"Within the fraternity of professional public opinion pollsters, Rep. John B. Anderson’s independent presidential campaign is regarded today as a serious challenge that could result in Anderson’s election to the White House next November."

"A first class congressman, a smart man with interesting ideas, and a figure of some moment in the House."

"Anderson, alone in the Republican field, has been waging a campaign focused on the issues that are bedeviling America. And he has been making uncommonly good sense. The remarkable thing about him is that he combines two qualities this country very much needs today: a conservative approach to fiscal, tax, and business matters, and a tough but sane attitude toward foreign affairs."

"We would commend any voter who, from principle, casts a ballot for him. The Illinois congressman has demonstrated that directness wins respect from voters, even when they disagree with what they hear."

"What he did was prove, again, that here is a remarkable candidate of courage and integrity, one who refuses to shape his plans and his principles to conform to this or that pressure group. Instead, he values the welfare of all Americans."

"Anderson not only is eloquent, he is forthright to the point of bluntness. He has disdained feeding Pablum to the populace. He has pinpointed the nation’s major problems and offered reasonable, if not always palatable, solutions to them."

"Overnight, Anderson has become a hero, not only to the civil rights forces, but also to Republican liberals and moderates who hanker for an attractive new face and a voice of eloquence to assume the lead in offering new solutions to the nation’s great domestic crises."

"Mr. Anderson is seen as one of those rare politicians whose political standards and sense of values seem more important to him than winning the next election. . . looking more and more like the quintessential man of principle."

"I had no great sense of failure. I didn’t come out of the campaign with the sense that I’d thrown my career away or thrown my life away on what was a fruitless, feckless endeavor. I felt that I had made my mark on the pages of history and laid down some markers for others possibly to follow."

"Anderson accomplished one of the rarest deeds in Congress . . . [he] actually persuaded some of his Republican colleagues to switch at the last minute from opposition to support of the bill."

"There is a thread that runs through American presidential politics. It is an urge to find, especially in difficult times, a candidate who is his own man, whose concerns are larger than his party’s, who is a rational moderate in pursuit of what is best for the whole country. In the spring of 1980, John Bayard Anderson of Rockford, Illinois seemed to have seized that thread. He was widely perceived to be good, decent, honest, less partisan, and more intelligent and experienced than the rest of the field."

"After spending an adult life of unfulfilled dreams and promises, a man has to prove something to himself. Maybe I’m trying to sum it all up to convince myself that everything I’ve been doing makes sense. I guess, I just want to get it all off my chest before I close up the books."

"The time has come to stop telling the American people only what they want them to hear, and start talking frankly about the sacrifices we must all make."

"[My position] is not designed to win votes. It is designed to address itself to what I think is a problem of crisis proportions. I believe that when you are facing that kind of emergency, you have to be willing to prescribe some pretty tough action. I think the American people are ready for some straight answers. . . When you are confronted with a genuine emergency, then I think you have to look at the interest of the country first."

"Put me down as a believer. John Anderson is the most impressive candidate in the presidential field. . . Reporters are not used to politicians who look you directly in the eye and tell you exactly what they believe. . . He is giving up a safe congressional seat after twenty years. I admire him for not wanting to spend the rest of his life posturing and pretending to leadership. He decided to try to lead."

"I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy."

"If disillusionment is one of life’s natural forms of contemplation, the experience of dislocation is another. This happens when we are forced by circumstance to occupy a very different standpoint from our normal one, and our angle of vision suddenly changes to reveal a strange and threatening landscape. . . . The value of dislocation, like the value of disillusionment, is in the way that it moves us beyond illusion, so we can see reality in the round—since what we are ble to see depends entirely on where we stand."

"in the precise sense that it violates my integrity and identity . . . When I violate myself, I invariably end up violating the people I work with. How many teachers inflict their own pain on their students, the pain that comes from doing what never was, or no longer is, their true work."

"In depression, the built-in bunk detector that we all possess is not only turned on but is set on high."

"One of the hardest things we must sometimes do is to be present to another person's pain without trying to fix it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery."