People From Alabama

"We've got to keep 6 billion people happy without destroying our planet. It's the biggest challenge we've ever faced....but we're taking it on."

"Wooh green-screen ponies!"

"Hank: "If you just say enough things, some of them will end up on those quote websites." // John: "Which, of course, is the point of being a person.""

"Ursula Le Guin has been a hero of mine for 20 years. She's done so much, and she will continue to do good even though she's gone. I honestly don't know what I would have become if it weren't for Ursula Le Guin. The first time I read "A Wizard of Earthsea" I realized how balance could be even more epic than war. Suddenly, Fantasy wasn't just wish fulfillment and grandeur, it was real and complex."

"I see them as they are to is And not the seeming isness of the was."

"Music is a plane of wisdom, because music is a universal language, it is a language of honor, it is a noble precept, a gift of the Airy Kingdom, music is air, a universal existence … common to all the living. Music is existence, the key to the universal language. Because it is the universal language."

"Sometimes in the ignorance I feel the meaning Invincible invisible wisdom, And I commune with intuitive instinct With the force that made life be And since it made life be It is greater than life And since it let extinction be It is greater than extinction. I commune with feelings more than prayer"

"Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Music."

"People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it's like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens. Light and all that — someone made that; it's written that they did. But nobody made the darkness. My music is about dark tradition. Dark tradition means a lot more about than black tradition. There's a lot of division in what they call black. I'm not into division. I'm into coordination, discipline and tradition."

"Somewhere in the other side of nowhere is a place in space beyond time where the Gods of mythology dwell. … These gods dwell in their mythocracies as opposed to your theocracies, democracies, and monocracies. They dwell in a magic world. These Gods can even offer you immortality."

"What I'm dealing with is so vast and great that it can't be called the truth. It's above the truth."

"Well, actually, I'm a psychic being, and you know, we don't concern ourselves with being born; we concern ourselves with being eternal; we deal with the spirit."

"I never wanted to be a part of planet Earth, but I am compelled to be here, so anything I do for this planet is because the Master-Creator of the Universe is making me do it. I am of another dimension. I am on this planet because people need me."

"Music is not material. Music is Spiritual."

"In some far off place Many light years in space I’ll wait for you. Where human feet have never trod, Where human eyes have never seen. I'll build a world of abstract dreams And wait for you."

"I think of myself as a complete mystery. To myself."

"Proper evaluations of words and letters in their phonetic and associated sense can bring the people of earth to the clear light of pure cosmic wisdom."

"The future is never Never comes tomorrow Never is not"

"I probably do what I'm controlled to do. Something … made all this: some Impossibility without a name. That's what the world is controlled by: an Impossibility. It's controlled by someone they call "God" who never had a beginning and naturally had no end. And in a sense He doesn't exist, because of the standards of reality, because everybody knows something can't just happen — but if there is a God, that's what happened; just happened to be, and without ever having not been — they got to face that."

"It takes a motion to notion and it takes a notion to motion."

"Out of nowhere they come like embers suddenly aflame With living reach Spiral infinity Being. Yes. Out of nowhere they come from the no point."

"When the person Myth meets the person Reality The spirit of the impossible-strange appears In dark disguise It is always there where nothing inverts itself and becomes something Whatever is the imperative need"

"Behold the pre-prophetic symbols of the planes of Never. Behold, behold this thisness! This isness."

"Every object in the Universe with a temperature above absolute zero radiates in the infrared, so this part of the spectrum contains a great deal of information."

"I had a role in developing the doctrine From the Sea, which was later modified to Forward From the Sea. But the way we looked at the situation was that the world we live in is a dangerous place. There's a violent peace out there, there are going to be problems over the horizon, and certainly that proved to be true."

"When we went to Bosnia the people in Bosnia welcomed us with open arms, and I would go down the street and people would come up and say, "Admiral, thank you for bringing peace to Bosnia." And my standard answer was this, "I cannot bring peace to this country. Only you can bring peace to this country. I can bring the conditions in which peace can be established, but I cannot bring peace to this country." So the mistake we have made in our country, if we have made a mistake, is that we believe that we can influence or that we can enforce a peace, and we cannot. You can stop the fighting, and we did. And you can put money into a country and you can try to build it up so that the momentum you get from a visible economic engine creates a condition where peace will take hold. But that requires a political will that is not today evident in Bosnia. It was certainly not evident when I was there. I think we are doing the right thing to put our military into these kinds of operations. No one is better able to do it. Peacekeeping is not a soldier function, but only soldiers can do it, because we've got the organization. We can make things happen in a hurry."

"I remember a picture I saw in a paper not long before the wall came down. There was a man standing holding a very young daughter, my guess was that she was only about one or two years old. She had on a rather plain dress, he had on a coat and a tie and he was carrying probably a cardboard suitcase. And my guess is that everything he owned in the world was in that suitcase. And he was weeping. He wasn't weeping because he left his car and the rest of his family back on the other side of that Iron Curtain; he was weeping because he was free. He was weeping because now he had opportunity, he had the chance to choose for the first time in his life, and his daughter whom he was holding in his hands had a future, whereas before she would not have had one. That struck me as a very, very vivid picture of what this all meant."

"We went out on a very cloudy day, in an area we probably should not have been operating in, and the two of us did a maneuver that was not authorized, and I made it and he didn't. … We pulled up over some overcast to dive bomb the target. I had practice with this maneuver in the Med, but Bill was less familiar with it. I made it, but Bill just disappeared. I went back and looked for hims. I saw no race of any wreckage. I tried to tank and go back but was ordered to return to the ship."

"The Naval Academy is a very prestigious place, and I choose to try it. I got there and darn near didn't pass, just about flunked out the first year, but a commandant by the name of Bush Bringle managed to call me in one day and taught me more about leadership in about 15 minutes than I have learned in the rest of my life. And because of Bush Bringle I regained some faith and confidence in myself, learning I had a little bit more in me than I thought, and I went back to work and finished."

"With Leighton Smith in charge, we've got a Navy admiral running a predominantly land campaign — the first ever in NATO's 47-year history. … As the U.S. continues to withdraw from overseas bases, Naval Forces will become even more relevant in meeting American forward presence requirements."

"There were a lot of people who were willing to write a letter for me. Not because I was academically inclined, but because I worked hard."

"Our meeting with Admiral Leighton Smith, on the other hand, did not go well. He had been in charge of the NATO air strikes in August and September [1995], and this gave him enormous credibility, especially with the Bosnian Serbs. Smith was also the beneficiary of a skillful public relations effort that cast him as the savior of Bosnia. In a long profile, Newsweek had called him "a complex warrior and civilizer, a latter-day George C. Marshall." This was quite a journalistic stretch, given the fact that Smith considered the civilian aspects of the task beneath him and not his job — quite the opposite of what General Marshall stood for. After a distinguished thirty-three-year Navy career, including almost three hundred combat missions in Vietnam, Smith was well qualified for his original post as commander of NATO's southern forces and Commander in Chief of all U.S. naval forces in Europe. But he was the wrong man for his additional assignment as IFOR commander, which was the result of two bureaucratic compromises, one with the French, the other with the American military. General Joulwan rightly wanted the sixty thousand IFOR soldiers to have as their commanding officer an Army general trained in the use of ground forces. But Paris insisted that if Joulwan named a separate Bosnia commander, it would have to be a Frenchman. This was politically impossible for the United States; thus, the Franh objections left only one way to preserve an American chain of command — to give the job to Admiral Smith, who joked that he was now known as "General" Smith. … On the military goals of Dayton, he was fine; his plans for separating the forces along the line we had drawn in Dayton and protecting his forces were first-rate. But he was hostile to any suggestions that IFOR help implement any nonmilitary portion of the agreement. This, he said repeatedly, was not his job. Based on Shalikashvili's statement at White House meetings, Christopher and I had assumed that the IFOR commander would use his authority to do substantially more than he was obligated to do. The meeting with Smith shattered that hope. Smith and his British deputy, General Michael Walker, made clear that they intended to take a minimalist approach to all aspects of implementation other than force protection. Smith signaled this in his first extensive public statement to the Bosnian people, during a live call-in program on Pale Television — an odd choice for his first local media appearance. During the program, he answered a question in a manner that dangerously narrowed his own authority. He later told Newsweek about it with a curious pride: "One of the questions I was asked was, "Admiral, is it true that IFOR is going to arrest Serbs in the Serb suburbs of Sarajevo?" I said, "Absolutely not, I don't have the authority to arrest anybody"." This was an inaccurate way to describe IFOR's mandate. It was true IFOR was not supposed to make routine arrests of ordinary citizens. But IFOR had the authority to arrest indicted war criminals, and could also detain anyone who posed a threat to its forces. Knowing what the question meant, Smith had sent an unfortunate signal of reassurance to Karadzic — over his own network."

"I didn't realize it at the time, but it became apparent to me later, that I had just experienced the most incredible lesson in leadership that I would ever experience: a Navy captain, who was in charge of the entire day-to-day operations of the Naval Academy, took the time to reach down deep into that organization and drag an individual up who was having trouble and try to instill in that individual a little bit of self-discipline and self-confidence. He knew my uncle, obviously, but I felt he would have done this for anyone in my predicament regardless of who his relatives were."

"It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication – whether it’s TV, movies, or books – begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones."

"You never know how things are gonna turn out, though, and that's the truth. You aim for one place, sure as an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you. I don't believe I ever met one person who became what they wanted to be when they were your age."

"The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know it's happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you "sir." It just happens."

"See this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves."

"Well, gentlemen, I'll tell ya — for the first 60 feet that was a hell of a pitch."

"I couldn't believe Mays could throw that far. I figured there had to be a relay. Then I found out there wasn't. He's too good for this world.✱"

"You know I didn't think that he would ever get to the ball, but he did. But then he had the presence of mind to wheel and throw the ball to second base to keep Larry Doby from scoring. Actually if he had tagged up, he could have scored from second base; that's how far the ball was hit. Now on the way in, after we got the third out, I ran in with him. You know, so I said to him, I said 'I didn't think you were going to get to that one'. He said 'You kiddin'? I had that one all the way.'"

"Mays is no safety-first player, and that's one of the reasons why he's such a great guy on the bases. Those safety-first players are worth five cents a bushel. They stand around counting their money while a guy like Willie is winning the game."

"I always thought Joe DiMaggio's catch of a ball Hank Greenberg hit about 1938 was the best. DiMag turned as soon as the ball was hit and was still going at top speed when he caught the ball near the monument in centerfield at Yankee Stadium. But DiMaggio's catch is now No. 2. I've just seen No. 1. To give you an idea of what Mays beat and with what respect DiMaggio's catch was held, the Tiger bench waved towels at DiMaggio as mark of esteem. But that Mays. He makes impossible catches."

"It was here that Mays amazed again. He scooped the ball up at the base of the 406-foot sign, whirled and fired. It came in on one bounce, directly in front of the plate, and into the glove of catcher Tom Haller, who put it on the astonished Willie Stargell. It was described by old-timers as the greatest throw ever made in ancient Forbes Field, but it was a costly one. Mays hurt himself on the heroic effort."

"An unusual event occurred in the seventh. Greengrass tripled over the head of Willie Mays. To a Giant fan this is like tripling over the Empire State building. Willie galloped after the drive but his horse ran second as the ball descended a few inches beyond his reach, a step or two away from the centerfield fence."

"He and Joe DiMaggio are the greatest center fielders I ever saw. But Joe couldn't run the bases as well: he wasn't as daring as Willie. I would pay money just to see him play. He brings back the old days for a fellow like myself."

"How about that arm? It's the greatest I ever saw. , of the old-time Yankees, was good, too. But you can't beat Willie."

"I'm a very lucky guy. I had so many people help me over the years that I never had many problems. If I had a problem, I could sit down with someone and they would explain the problem to me, and the problem become like a baseball game. You're at home plate now, how do you get to first? How do you get to second? How do you get to third? When you get back to home, your problem is solved. That's the way I view the business world, I view it as a baseball game. Once you start thinking the way you've been taught to think over so many years, you have no problems."

"I would say the main thing in any young kid's life is education. Even if a guy is prejudiced, he can be educated to understand why he is prejudiced. Education plays a great role in all life, whether you're black or white. You've got to go to high school, you've got to go to college. When you come out of college or high school, you can play sports. If you ever get hurt, they can't take that brain away from you, you've got that."

"The greatest challenge I think is adjusting to not playing baseball. The reason for that is that I had to come out of baseball and come into the business world, not being a college graduate, not being educated to come into the business world the way I should have. And, instead of people doing things for me, I had to do things for myself. That was scary for me."

"People talk about that catch and, I've said this many times, that I've made better catches than that many times in regular season. But of course in my time, you didn't have a lot of television during the regular season. A lot of people didn't see me do a lot of things."