Television Personalities

"New York, New York. Big city of dreams, but everything in New York ain't always what it seems. Last Twitter posting by DJ AM (August 25, 2009)."

"I hadn't heard his remixes and didn't know how amazing a drummer Travis is. But we got together, I threw on James Brown's 'Funky Drummer,' one of the most sampled beats in hip-hop, and 'I Know You Got Soul' by Bobby Byrd. His face would just open up; he would match the beat perfectly. I thought, 'Damn, this is fun.' It's like a skeleton you get to put the clothes on. And once the clothes are on, you yank out the spine."

"I have really bad days and I have really OK days. It's strange. I'm blessed. I'm alive. I'm here."

"They shaved my head and took layers of skin from my scalp. To heal the wounds, I was in a hyperbaric chamber for 90 minutes twice daily for four days. It’s claustrophobic. One of my first nights home, I watched ‘Iron Man’ with friends. In the scene where Robert Downey Jr. comes out of the cave with a blowtorch, my whole body cringed. That night, I had a nightmare someone spilled fuel on me and was trying to light me on fire. I woke up and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is going to happen forever?’"

"There’s no reason why I should have lived or why I lived and they didn’t. And it’s something I struggle with every day."

"I've prayed every night for the past 10 years. There's a lot more to thank God for now. My philosophy is 'live life to the fullest,' [and] I was saved for a reason. Maybe I'm going to help someone else. I don't question it. All I know is, I'm thankful I'm still here."

"We were live on-air and I had to fill for time, so I just rolled up on him — I didn't know him. And I remember thinking how unfazed he was that we'd just shoved a camera in his face, because he was kind, he was charismatic, he was funny. He was a good guy and I remember that meeting very well. We spoke after that, and we would see each other out a lot and I would go and see him play. He was always cool, like effortlessly cool."

"Feed the soul, starve the ego."

"(on the plane crash) I saw Travis running and flailing, trying to put out fire on his body. He screamed, ‘What do I do?’ and I said, ‘Roll!’ He did, but the fire didn’t go out. He tried to rip his clothes off. I finally put the flames out by smothering him with my body. Some of my burns are from that. His sock was on fire – I burned my fingers taking it off."

"I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market."

"I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse."

"What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to each other for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer."

"The people who run the international tests told us, "the biggest predictor of student success is choice." Nations that "attach the money to the kids" and thereby allow parents to choose between different public and private schools have higher test scores. This should be no surprise; competition makes us better."

"There is some good evidence man contributes to global warming. But I say, so what? We can deal with that. It's not a catastrophe. And cold is far worse for hurting people than warmth."

"I love Wikipedia. I donated thousands of dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation."

"The aim of fiction is to break down stereotypes. Unfortunately, the publishing and academic industries seem to profit more from reinforcing stereotypes. This is what African American intellectuals have to deal with too. That's why I feel I'm on the same wavelength with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West, James Alan McPherson. Why should a minority person be made to feel guilty because she believes education leads to both self-improvement and national enlightenment? To me, class is as divisive as race."

"He manages to combine academia with the public sphere in a way that I find wonderful"

"There haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America. There’s been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

"Henry Louis Gates told me that I must assert that I am first and foremost a poet, not just an activist poet. My work encompasses activist poetry but also does a lot more than protest. I am reinventing bicultural forms. I am an innovator: the creator of the Chinese-American quatrain, of the lyric manifesto, of erotic haiku and remix sonnets!"

"We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?"

"(on a line in the movie 2012) " 'The neutrinos have mutated.' Now, for the non-nerds here: neutrinos are tiny, sub-atomic, really really almost massless particles, they're released in nuclear breakdowns, like in the sun, for example. Five hundred trillion of them pass through your bodies every second. They can't mutate. Their structure is fundamental to the structure of the universe. Right? They can't just change. He might as well have gone, 'The electrons are angry'.""

"And the Day Two pain of the gym! When you go back to the gym and you're in agony, and every bit of you is in pain. And the gym guy, you go up to him, you go "Why am I in so much pain?"—and he goes "That's because you're using muscles you haven't used in years." And you look at him and go "Why the fuck are we wasting our time with those muscles?"

"I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', "Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years!" Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out."

"Chinese medicine, oh, Chinese medicine! "But there are billions of Chinese, Chinese medicine must be working." Here's the skinny on Chinese medicine. A hundred years ago the average life expectancy in China was 30. The life expectancy in China at the moment is 73. And it's not feckin' tiger penis that turned it around for the Chinese. Didn't do much for the tiger, if you don't mind me pointing out."

"Anyone, in answer to the difficult questions in life, the "I don't know what happens after I die" or "What happens if my loved ones die?" or "How can I stop myself dying?", the big questions, who gives you an easy bullshit answer, and you go "Well, do you have any evidence for that?" and they go "Ah, there is more to life than evidence", get in the fucking sack."

""The great thing about homeopathy is that you can't overdose on it." Well, you could fucking drown!"

"Right now I would take homeopaths and I'd put them in a big sack with psychics, astrologers and priests. And I'd close the top of the sack with string, and I'd hit them all with sticks. And I really wouldn't worry who got the worst of the belting with the sticks."

""Oh, but they're [the Chinese] so wise. They have one word for 'crisis' and 'opportunity'." Yes, but they also have one word for 'China' and 'Tibet' and it's 'China', so fuck them."

"Stop taking it literally—it's only the Bible, it's not gospel."

"If we were truly created by God, then why do we still occasionally bite the insides of our own mouths?"

"I said "Anyone Jewish here?" and someone goes "I'm Jewish!" and I said … "And what year is this now in the Jewish calendar?" And she goes, "Er, I wasn't expecting questions, to be honest ..."—and then turned to her presumably gentile friend and had a bit of a natter—and then came back with the single finest answer I have ever heard from a member of an audience, where, without any shame at all, she just went, "Yeah, it's the Jewish Year of the Rat.""

"Here's my favorite little fact. If anyone is ever described to you as a nutritionist, just be slightly wary, right? What they're saying may be perfectly true, but "nutritionist" isn't a protected term. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. "Dietician" is the legally protected term. "Dietician" is like "dentist", and "nutritionist" is like "tooth-i-ologist."

"Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you."

"Kids are my favorites … their spirit and curiosity has not yet been dulled by schools."

"We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can't read, write or calculate. We don't have academic honesty or intellectual rigor. Schools have abandoned integrity and rigor."

"If I want a word, I make it. I don't like combustion. It's too quiet. I have some stuff in a state of combustication."

"It is important that we subscribe to the requirements of nature."

"My view is this: We teach nothing. We do not teach physics nor do we teach students. (I take physics merely as an example.) What is the same thing: No one is taught anything! Here lies the folly of this business. We try to teach somebody nothing. This is a sorry endeavour for no one can be taught a thing. What we do, if we are successful, is to stir interest in the matter at hand, awaken enthusiasm for it, arouse a curiosity, kindle a feeling, fire up the imagination. To my own teachers who handled me in this way, I owe a great and lasting debt."

"My first TV series on demonstrations in physics — titled Why Is It So? were now seen and heard over the land. The mail was massive. The academics were a special triumph for me. They charged me with being superficial and trivial. If I had done what they wanted my programs would be as dull as their classes! I knew my purpose well and clear: to show how Nature behaves without cluttering its beauty with abtruse mathematics. Why cloud the charm of a Chladni plate with a Bessel function?"

"Why is it so?"

"I'm not a religious man, right, I don't even believe in God. But still Catholic, obviously."

"Whatever work you undertake to do in your lifetime, it is very important that first you have a passion for it — you know, get excited about it — and second, that you have fun with it. That's important. Otherwise, you see, your work becomes nothing but an idle chore. Then, you hate the life you live."

"There are three states of legality in Irish law. There is all this stuff here under "That's grand"; then it moves into "Ah, now, don't push it"; and finally to "Right! You're taking the piss." And that's where the police sweep in."

"Let's get back to what I regard as a fundamental issue here. I know it’s politically unpopular, politically incorrect. I know it goes against all of the populist indignation that’s out there right now. But you can’t really, it seems to me, expect that these Wall Street companies are going to be run well by a bunch of people who don’t make more than $250,000."

"It’s just like when the Allies were victorious over Nazi Germany in World War II, when we occupied the country, we left a lot of Nazis in place because they were the ones who made the trains run on time and the bureaucracy function properly, etc. And it was distasteful, but you needed them. And in fact, our experience in Iraq kind of demonstrates the wisdom of that, because in Iraq we replaced the Baathist bureaucrats and the result was chaos. Not to compare Wall Street to Iraq or Nazi Germany, but the point is you need people who know what they’re doing."

"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."

"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: 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 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!!!"