Telling Quotes - page 79
...The concept of the United States of America is the greatest concept in the world. It's beautiful. It's a wonderful concept. There's no place like America. So, for people to come in and try to fuck that up is ridiculous. I'm a Black man, and I'm telling you this: I've been all over the world. The only places I haven't been are Africa, China, and Russia. Here, people say "African American.” Don't call me no African American. I'm a Black American. [You're not] going to label me to try to say that I don't belong in this country when my people have fought and died to establish this country. Black soldiers have fought and died for this country. They were doing it for Mississippi and Georgia and Alabama. I'm a Black American.
Smokey Robinson
Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words."
You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops."
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.
Robert Sapolsky
"Telling the truth”-which for so long was itself a problematic exercise thanks to competing "truths” and the cost of airing them publicly-now became a virtue in itself. And the bigger the truth you have to tell, the greater your claim upon the attention of fellow citizens and sympathetic observers. Thus, despite the obvious risk of appearing to compete with the ultimate truth of Jewish genocide, speaking openly about hitherto uncomfortable episodes in the recent German past opens the possibility of encouraging the telling of many stories.
Tony Judt
The governments are tapped out. This is why and this is when ... the billionaires need to step up now on a one-time basis, $6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don't reach them. It's not complicated... I'm not asking them to do this every day, every week, every year... We have a one-time crisis: a perfect storm of conflict, climate change and COVID. ...Just help me with them one time... The world's in trouble and you're telling me you can't give me .36% of your net worth increase to help the world in trouble, in times like this?... What if it was your daughter starving to death? What if it was your family starving to death? Wake up, smell the coffee, and help... My god, people are dying out there... We have a vaccine for this. It's called money, food.
Jeff Bezos
Maybe there are lots of children or certainly those who are not drawn to my work because they don't want to see those shadows. But, I'm telling what it was like for me. And I know it was not unique for me.
I've known many children, many unhappy and many disturbed children who don't know how to talk about it. And you know, the strangest thing... the fan mail I get from kids are asking me questions which they do not ask their mothers and fathers. Because if they had, why write to me, a perfect stranger?
Maurice Sendak
Our villagers are the biggest story-tellers in all the country round. It's a known fact. You're a stranger in these parts, or else you'd have heard it already. All they want is a fight. They're the most awful beggars for getting up fights - it's meat and drink to them. ... I've no doubt they've been telling you what a hero you were, and how you were bound to win, in the cause of right and justice, and so on; but let me tell you, I came down the street just now, and they were betting six to four on the dragon freely!"
"Six to four on the dragon!" murmured St. George sadly, resting his cheek on his hand. "This is an evil world, and sometimes I begin to think that all the wickedness in it is not entirely bottled up inside the dragons...
Kenneth Grahame
What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and... 5) whom to vote for.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
...Lucretius talked epicureanism stoically (like Heine's Englishman taking his pleasures sadly), and concluded on his stren gospel of pleasure by committing suicide. His noble epic "on the Nature of Things", follows Epicurus in damning pleasure with faint praise. Almost contemporary with Caesar and Pompey, he lived in the midst of turmoil and alarms; his nervous pen is forever inditing prayers to tranquility and peace. One pictures him as a timid soul whose youth had been darkened with religious fears; for he never tires of telling his readers that there no hell, except here, and there are no gods except gentlemanly ones who live in a garden of Epicurus in the clouds, and never intrude in the affairs of men.
Will Durant
History is a combination of a lot of things. You can't isolate events today and say, "Oh, well, this happened-those awful people.” The acts might be brutal, but there must be a context to it. I certainly didn't want to drop the reader into those incidents without telling the story of, well: Why are there refugees? Why were the Israelis and the Palestinians battling along the border? Who were the fedayeen? What was the Israeli response to that? But more than that, I think, for me, the book ends up being-this is going to sound strange-a dead end. Because I don't know where to go from here, except to delve into human psychology. I think I understand how history works. I understand why one people are battling another people. I understand that they both want land. But ultimately there's a level that I haven't really got to yet...
Joe Sacco
A good part - and definitely the most fun part - of being a feminist is about frightening men. American and Australian feminists have always known this, and absorbed it cheerfully into their act; one thinks of Shere Hite julienning men on phone- in shows, or Dale Spender telling us that a good feminist is rude to a man at least three times a day on principle. Of course, there's a lot more to feminism... but scaring the shit out of scumbags is an amusing and necessary part because, sadly, a good many men still respect nothing but strength.
Julie Burchill
I have no technical advice or counsel to offer those of you who labor in this vineyard, the one that produces words and pictures. You will, I am sure, forgive me for not telling you that instruments with which you work are miraculous, that your responsibility is unprecedented or that your aspirations are frequently frustrated. It is not necessary to remind you of the fact that your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other. All of these things you know.
Edward R. Murrow
Julian exposed another set of wars. Basically, he exposed the so-called war on terror, which began after 9/11, has lasted 20 years, has led to six wars, millions killed, trillions wasted. That is the only balance sheet of that war. ... And if they think that punishing him in this vindictive and punitive way is going to change people's attitudes to coming out and telling the truth, they're wrong
Julian... should never have been kept in prison for bail. He should not be in prison now awaiting a trial for extradition. He should be released. And I hope that acts like the Belmarsh Tribunal will help to bring that nearer.
Julian Assange
A special consideration suggests the value of a development of national interest in recreation and sports. There is no better common denominator of a people. In the case of a people which represents many nations, cultures and races, as does our own, a unification of interests and ideals in recreations is bound to wield a telling influence for solidarity of the entire population. No more truly democratic force can be set off against the tendency to class and caste than the democracy of individual parts and prowess in sport.
Calvin Coolidge
Oh, the stories-those are an amalgam. I don't think she would've defined herself like that, but my mother was a great storyteller. She always held me captive. She smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, and she'd always say, "Adrienne, I wanna tell you something.” She is just all over my whole writing career. And my father, because he gave speeches. Really, everything I write is a kind of mixture of his speeches, and her telling me all these stories about Georgia.
Adrienne Kennedy
I'm kinda looking forward to being old, you know really really old, so that I can lean over in a restaurant with my son or daughter and say: "You know what I just did? I just pissed myself, you deal with it, then carry on telling me about you job or divorce or whatever the fuck it is, I'm not really listening to you to be honest, which one are you Siobhan or Simon? I can never tell."
Dylan Moran
Her distrust in the way the authorities handled things had begun at the age of thirteen, in Utica. She had been sitting on the sofa in their living room with Anne on one side and her mother on the other. She had been eating a hamburger and watching the Dallas police escort Lee Harvey Oswald across an underground parking garage. There were lots of Dallas police. So many, in fact, that the TV announcer was telling the country that someone had shot Oswald before all those police - all those people in authority - seemed to have the slightest inkling something had gone wrong, let alone what it was.
Stephen King
I foresaw political correctness 43 years ago. ... whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I'd combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both. They both want to control you. ... I say to both bunches, Whether you're a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write. Their society breaks down into subsections of minorities who then, in effect, burn books by banning them. All this political correctness that's rampant on campuses is B.S. You can't fool around with the dangerous notion of telling a university what to teach and what not to.
Ray Bradbury
The Christian, southern girl in me didn't see it that way because sex was not normalized as a child or in the south. And, you know what, fuck it, I'm just gonna say it: my #MeToo story is me telling somebody that someone did this to me, and they never got in trouble for it. They never got taken out of the movie they were in.
Demi Lovato
