Happening Quotes - page 55
I think politics can seem a burden when we feel alone and powerless against enormous and impersonal forces out there in the public realm. The late years of the Vietnam War when a lot of poets were giving antiwar readings was a very crucial time for me. In the 1960s, when poetry was very much part of public life, I began trying to make connections for myself between the havoc being wreaked by my government on a small country thousands of miles away, which I and so many of my friend were protesting, and the relations between human beings within my country, especially the relations between women and men. That kind of synthesis really wasn't happening yet in the public sphere, but I was trying to make that synthesis in my poetry-which was the only way I knew how to do it.
Adrienne Rich
...so much joy to the world...and the system, meaning the record companies, totally took advantage of me.
This is very important, what we're fighting for, because I'm tired, I'm really REALLY tired of manipulation.
I'm tired of the how the press is manipulating everything that's been happening to this situation.
They do not tell the truth, they lie. They manipulate, they manipulate our history books.
The history books are not true: it's a lie. The history books are lying. You need to know that, you must know that.
All the forms of popular music: from jazz to hip-hop to be-bop to .. to SOUL.
To um, uh, dances, from the cake-walk. to the jitter-bug, to the Charleston, to uh, breakdancing.
All of these are forms of black dancing.
Michael Jackson
The trouble with words like "fit" in these discussions is that, if taken in a wide sense they are liable to become vacuous, and if taken more narrowly they easily become tendentious. Thus the phrase "survival of the fittest" does not mean much if it means only "survival of those most likely to survive." If on the hand it means "survival of those whom we should admire most" or the like, it describes a different state of affairs; we shall need different arguments to persuade us that this is happening. In just the same way, Wilson equivocates with the notion that to be "fit" is an advantage to anybody. If it means "healthy" or "able to do what he wants to do" then it usually is so. But if it only means "likely to have many descendants," then there is no reason for treating it as an advantage at all.
Mary Midgley
Hold on. I realize - can, just, just - I realize something's happening in Ferguson, but we're talking about something important here, so can you at least split-screen the video? I realize - look, the protesters and the police are clashing again, alright? They're clashing again. But we're talking about the dead- the death of an American- of an American who was beheaded, and Pete deserves his say.
Megyn Kelly
I began my book about perestroika and the new thinking with the following words: "We want to be understood". After a while I felt that it was already happening. But now I would like once again to repeat those words here, from this world rostrum. Because to understand us really - to understand so as to believe us - proved to be not at all easy, owing to the immensity of the changes under way in our country. Their magnitude and character are such as to require in-depth analysis. Applying conventional wisdom to perestroika is unproductive. It is also futile and dangerous to set conditions, to say: We'll understand and believe you, as soon as you, the Soviet Union, come completely to resemble "us", the West.
No one is in a position to describe in detail what perestroika will finally produce. But it would certainly be a self-delusion to expect that perestroika will produce "a copy" of anything.
Mikhail Gorbachev
At Newark airport, I climbed into a taxi. Wearing my uniform with all my ribbons and my Vietnamese airborne beret, I kept waiting for the driving to make a big fuss and exclaim "Hey! You're just back from Vietnam, aren't you!" Nothing. So I fed him hints like, "Gee, I haven't seen Newark for a while." But he dropped me at my mother's place with scarcely a word... I was pretty disoriented. I couldn't think about anything but Vietnam. The war was all over the newspapers, but people seemed not to care. Even when Mom introduced me to a few of her friends, they only said things like, "Well, I guess now you'll be able to get on with your life." No one wanted to know about Vietnam: the public wasn't caught up in the war, not at all like the spirit I remembered from my boyhood, during World War II. After two days I wanted to run through the streets yelling, "Hey! In Vietnam people are dying! Americans are dying! How can you act like nothing is happening?"
Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr.
If Stalin engineered the Prague coup without fully anticipating these consequences, it was not just because he had always planned to enforce his writ in a certain way throughout the bloc. Nor was it because Czechoslovakia mattered much in the grand scheme of things. What happened in Prague-and what was happening at the same time in Germany, where Soviet policy was moving swiftly from stonewalling and disagreement to open confrontation with her former allies-was a return by Stalin to the style and strategy of an earlier era. This shift was driven in general terms by Stalin's anxiety at his inability to shape European and German affairs as he wished; but also and above all by his growing irritation with Yugoslavia.
Tony Judt
There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time around. It could come only out of the ferment that characterizes today's pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today's most important musicians, sings his own 'Surf's Up.'
Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, 'Surf's Up' is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.
Brian Wilson
![They [the Government] argue that if the rich are made rich enough, some wealth will spill over to make the poor less poor. There is no sign of that happening. On the contrary, the gap has widened. The number of those below the poverty line and with little hope of rising above it has grown inexorably. Connected divides become deeper and wider-that between the employed and the unemployed, that between the north and south, and that between those who share prosperity and those to whom it looks like a closed fortress. The Budget...does nothing to counteract that. ... If I were the Chancellor, I would be deeply apprehensive for the future cohesion of our society under his policies. (Roy Jenkins)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/31/roy-jenkins-above-budget-1008431.webp)
This is what's so frightening about the trends in education today. Cromwell told his portrait painter, ‘Paint me, warts and all.' That's not what is happening in America, where the trend in education is to paint only America's warts. So even the great Kate Smith, who sang "God Bless America” for years, is having her statue taken down because she made a racially insensitive record in 1931. Well you know who really had a racially insensitive record in 1931? The Democratic Party. But unlike Kate Smith's statue, it's still around.
Mark Steyn
In conditions of free enterprise and competition, one does not have to contrive modernisation or introduce it by government decree. It happens, and keeps on happening, of its own accord. A firm or an industry or an attitude which is no longer modern simply does not survive; it goes under and is replaced by others which are modern. Our motor industry, our chemical industry, yes, our steel industry, do not have to be told to modernise themselves. They keep on doing it because they have to, in order to export and meet the challenge of a fiercely competitive and rapidly changing world. If Britain wants to be modern, there is no substitute for the system of competitive free enterprise by which the Tory Party stands.
Enoch Powell
I didn't think it was that big of a fucking deal, there's bigger news stories happening. There's a guy in Milwaukee with heads in his icebox, but our top story is: Sam Kinison missed the Joan Rivers Show. It's like I'm the only guy in show business that's fucked up recently. There's a couple guys that, I think, have like outdone me a little bit. Like Rick fucking James, for starters. I missed a show, I didn't torture a woman with a fucking base pipe, I'm not out on $500,000 bail. I'm not Billy Preston, who's going "ah, donde esta la fiesta?" How about Axl Rose, who has a warrant out for his arrest in the state of Missouri for inciting a riot, $300,000 worth of damage, 60 people injured, and I MISSED A SHOW!
Sam Kinison
I have told him nothing [an art-journalist in Paris who wrote in 1887: 'Seurat sees his paternity of the theory Neo-Impressionism contested by misinformed critics and unscrupulous comrades'], but what I have always thought: the more of us [the Neo-Impressionists] there are, the less originality we will have, and the day when everyone this technique, it will no longer have any value and people will look for something new as is already happening.. .It is my right to think this and to say it, since I paint in this way [ Neo-Impressionistic ], only to find a new approach which is my own.
Georges Seurat
[H]istorians will look back at this era of American politics and find it absolutely deranged that the political left, and mainstream institutions, embraced antiwhite identity politics at the same time that the United States desperately needed to strengthen its traditions of classically liberal civic nationalism, which offers the best hope for a racially pluralistic democracy to hold together. But that's not what's happening.
Rod Dreher
Mitch McConnell and the other elites really have not figured out what is happening in this moment of great crisis and upheaval. What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt.
Mitch McConnell
His agitation was subsiding; already he was becoming aware that he had not got it in him to make these men believe that what he said was true. He had had so much of this in the past; he was accustomed to being right and being disbelieved on vital issues. It was what happened to him; other people could put across their convictions and win credence, but he had never been able to do that. Now it was happening again.
Nevil Shute
It's a resentment of people [who are] writing about what we see is obvious gangsterism. They don't like that, so they say: ‘Fuck you, we're going to teach you people.' And they have to know they're going to be taught ... they can't get away with bullying us – people who have common sense and see what is happening in this world, and in this country. They cannot do it. It's a shame, it's a shame that [the Republicans] behave so badly.”.
Robert De Niro
The theorem tells you that maybe there must be something happening faster than light, although it pains me even to say that much. The theorem certainly implies that Einstein's concept of space and time, neatly divided up into separate regions by light velocity, is not tenable. But then, to say that there's something going faster than light is to say more than I know.
John Stewart Bell
Although Americans are starting to wake up, many people are still caught up in the mainstream narrative regarding the Syrian war.... Starting in 2011, tens of thousands of foreigners – Al Qaeda and other jihadists – were sent into Syria to overthrow Assad. The U.S. and its allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey & Jordan – assisted in buying and transporting weapons to the "insurgents.” Special forces from the U.S., U.K., France and Israel also spent billions of dollars arming and training the terrorists, a.k.a "moderate rebels.” What's happening in Syria is not a civil war – it's a proxy war. Assad has been fighting the Islamic terrorists for seven years. It's cynical and Orwellian for the West to shed crocodile tears for the Syrians and blame Assad for this brutal war. While the presstitutes make it look like Assad is fighting women and children, fact is that the rebels have highly sophisticated weapons – million-dollar tanks, U.S.-made anti-tank missiles that cost $250,000 etc..
Bashar al-Assad
Loving Haiti, you know, comes in the blood. And loving America, being grateful for what it's afforded my family, there are so many Americans now in my family. That's what also makes it sad to see what's happening now, in terms of how new immigrants are being scapegoated, to hear about children who could have been myself, dying at the border for lack of medical care...
Edwidge Danticat
We humans have always defined ourselves by narration. What's happening today is that we're allowing multi-national corporations to tell our stories for us. The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies. Individualism is bad for business – though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent. And yes, it's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism..
Tom Robbins
Some humor experts say the secret to humor is to combine something unexpected with something bad and then make sure it's happening to someone else. But if that's all it took, serial killers would be winning comedy competitions. The evening news is full of unexpected bad things that happen to other people. Most of it isn't funny, unless it involves exploding whales, ear biting, or pies thrown at billionaires.
Scott Adams
