All Quotes

"The standing armies, while a burden on the people, are inadequate for the achievement of great and decisive results in war, and meanwhile the mass of the people, untrained in arms, degenerates....The hegemony over Europe will fall to that nation which...becomes possessed of manly virtues and creates a national army."

"I remember when we were filming last year, someone was like, 'Are you guys ready for your lives to change?' And we were like, 'What are you talking about?' And it did happen, but there is no way to prepare for it."

"She's bolder than I am, and she's more of a risk taker, and that was something I thought would be a challenge. But I really enjoyed getting to tap into that part of her, and I learned from her in that way. I stole some of her boldness."

"I've seen shows on Broadway, and I've been through Times Square many, many, many times, not always willingly through the crowds. But every time I walk up to the theater and go in through the stage door, it's like this magical portal into this incredible world."

"A lot of times YA is associated with women and female audiences, and that's why sometimes it gets pushed aside. Everyone should just feel things and stop being afraid of it."

"Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses."

"Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my City of Cities float In sunset’s golden and crimson dyes: I look, and a great joy clutches my throat! Plateau of roofs by canyons crossed: windows by thousands fire-unfurled— O gazing, how the heart is lost in the Deepest City of the World!"

"They can only set free men free... And there is no need of that: Free men set themselves free."

"Hadn't he been blowing kisses to Earth millions of years before I was born?"

"Quick as a hummingbird is my love, Dipping into the hearts of flowers—She darts so eagerly, swiftly, sweetly, Dipping into the flowers of my heart..."

"We age inevitably: The old joys fade and are gone: And at last comes equanimity and the flame burning clear."

"Man's the bad child of the universe."

"The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; The wise grows it under his feet."

"When young persons are summoned from this world ere they have mingled in its sinful pursuits, they can be readily yielded into the hands of God, whose merciful providence is then rather a cause for joy and thanksgiving than an occasion of sorrowing and regret; because there is a well-founded hope of their having attained the great end of their existence — the enjoyment of eternal happiness."

"It doesn’t matter if it’s a lead or supporting role, bida or kontrabida—as long as it’s good, I will do it. I don’t want to keep doing the same things; I want to show my growth as an actress."

"I’m full of hate and I love it!"

"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming were becoming indistinguishable. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new."

"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clocks that drifted on the s over the moat."

"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it makes in the wind. If Waterlog was about the element of water, Wildwood is about the element of wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives. To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. sends the future as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in . There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees."

"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens during a rain-storm in the spring-fed moat that lies close to the house. In Wildwood (2007), his epic account of trees, woods and forest cultures around the world, Walnut Tree Farm is the fixed point to which Roger returns and from which he learns,even as he journeys out to the groves of Kazakhstan and the of Australia. And in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (2008), extracts from Roger's copious journals record both the labour and wonder involved in living in twelve acres of meadow, and woodland; the night-time bark of foxes, the viper-bite of s as he cleared scrub or laid hedges, and the fallen stars of glow-worms in the long grass."

"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of , in , and began a restoration, repairing stone walls and replacing roof tiles. Among the attributes of Walnut Tree Farm, as the house was called, was a deep, spring-fed . It didn’t surround the house, as with a fortified castle, but was excavated into the land, in roughly parallel lines, at the front and the back of the property. The moat had served its original, Elizabethan owner as a water supply, a cooler, and a status symbol. Over the centuries, it fell into disrepair, becoming silted up from falling leaves and rotting tree roots. Deakin had the moat dredged to a depth of ten feet; staked a wooden ladder by the bank, near the spreading roots of a tree; and began regularly swimming in the cold, greenish water. He gained what he called a frog’s-eye view of the changing seasons, and an intimate familiarity with the creatures sharing the moat, from to s."

"I went by our station on the way home... I like that sign. I think we're gonna be alright."

"[to Sonny about Lawrence Musgrove] You fucked him up! You fucked up that man's last walk!"

"I've always believed that a portrait captures a person far better than a photograph. It truly takes a human being to really see a human being."

"You ain't no man till you split dark oak."

"What the hell those niggers doing out there?"

"Damn porch monkeys! Your mother, she hated them niggers too."

"Billy Bob Thornton - Hank Grotowski"

"I help girls out."

"[to young woman] Right then dear, first thing we've got to do is put the kettle on."

"Right dear, you're gonna have to take your knickers off."

"Whatever she done, she done it out of the goodness of her heart!"

"However, there are ways of trying to strangle ideas they do not involve straight forward attempts at censorship or intimidation. The suggestion that there is something sinister, even un-American, about intense devotion to ideas, reason, logic, evidence, and precise language is one of them."

"The explicit distinction between those who are fit only to study and those who are history’s actors not only expresses contempt for intellectuals but also denigrates anyone who requires evidence, rather than power and emotion, as justification for public policy."

"First and foremost among the vectors of anti-intellectualism are the mass media."

"It is not that television, or any of its successors in the world of video, was designed as an enemy of active intellectual endeavor but that the media, while they may not actually be the message, inevitably reshape content to fit a form that subordinates both the spoken and the written word to visual image. In doing so, the media restrict their audience’s intellectual parameters not only by providing information in a highly condensed form but by filling time—a huge amount of time—that used to be occupied by engagement with the written word."

"Well-off professionals, including a fair number of intellectuals, have proved especially vulnerable to the bromide that there is no harm, and may be a great benefit, from video consumption as a way of life—as long as the videos are “educational.” But medical research does not support the comforting notion that a regular diet of videos, educational or otherwise, is good for the developing brains of infants and toddlers. A growing body of pediatric research does indicate that frequent exposure to any form of video in the early years of life produces older children with shortened attention spans. It does not matter whether the images are produced by a television network, a film studio, or a computer software company: what matters is the amount of time children spend staring at a monitor. The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that there is no safe level of viewing for children under age two, but whatever the Academy may recommend, the battle against videos for infants is already lost."

"It is a fine thing for tired parents to gain a quiet hour for themselves by mesmerizing small children with videos—who would be stuffy enough to suggest that the occasional hour in front of animals dancing to Tchaikovsky can do a baby any real harm?—But let us not delude ourselves that education is what is going on. Or rather, education is going on—but it is the kind of education that wires young brains to focus attention on prepackaged visual stimuli, accompanied by a considerable amount of noise."

"Memory, which depends on the capacity to absorb ideas and information through exposition and to connect new information to an established edifice of knowledge, is one of the first victims of video culture. Without memory, judgments are made on the unsound basis of the most recent bit of half-digested information."

"The second major spur to anti-intellectualism during the past forty years has been the resurgence of fundamentalist religion. Modern media, with their overt and covert appeal to emotion rather than reason, or ideally suited to assist in the propagation of a form of faith that stands opposed to most of the great rationalist insights they have transformed Western civilization since the beginning of the Enlightenment."

"The American marketing of the Apocalypse is a multi-media production, capitalizing on fundamentalism and paranoid superstition."

"Misguided objectivity, particularly with regard to religion, ignores the willed ignorance that is one of the defining characteristics of fundamentalism. One of the most powerful taboos in American life concerns speaking ill of anyone else’s faith—an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions."

"This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism."

"The perfect storm over evolution is a perfect example of the new anti-intellectualism in action, because it owes its existence not only to a renewed religious fundamentalism but to the widespread failings of American public education and the scientific illiteracy of much of the media."

"A scientist looks at emperor penguins and sees a classic example of random mutation, natural selection, and adaptation to the harshest climate on earth. A believer in creationism or intelligent design, however, looks at the same facts and sees not the inefficiency but the “miracle” of the survival of the species. Exactly why an “intelligent designer” would place the breeding grounds seventy miles from the feeding grounds or, for that matter, would install any species in such an inhospitable climate, are questions never addressed by those who see God’s hand at the helm."

"The obvious question of why a guiding intelligence would want to make things so difficult for his or her creations is never asked because it cannot be answered."

"“One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime,” Moyers said, “is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seats of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.”"

"Whatever the denomination or religion, fundamentalism has always been defined by its refusal to adapt to any secular knowledge that conflicts with its version of revealed religious truth; that refusal, in science and the humanities, has been the most enduring and powerful strand in American anti-intellectualism."

"The American religious landscape at the conclusion of the Revolution was pluralistic and somewhat chaotic: it bore little resemblance to the portrait of a devout, churchgoing America that the religious right loves to paint today."

"Translated into politics, freethought demanded a government based on the rights of man and human reason rather than divine authority—in other words, a secular government. The Constitution, with its pointed and conscious omission of any mention of God, as well as its prohibition of all religious tests for public office, formalized and legalized the freethought ideal of a government free of religious interference."