Starting Quotes - page 46
During these travels he's starting to train me in a most interesting way. We'd be sitting somewhere and I'd say,
"Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I ..."
And he'd say, "Don't think about the past. Just be here now."
Silence.
And I'd say, "How long do you think we're going to be on this trip?"
And he'd say, "Don't think about the future. Just be here now."
I'd say, "You know, I really feel crumby, my hips are hurting ..."
"Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean."
Ram Dass
There used to be beggar, a sort of maniac, who would jump up and dance like a monkey while singing tat tarigappa tei ta, tat tarigappa tei ta. Bala would imitate him, both dancing like monkeys... All of us tried to snub him but the beggar could not be turned out. It meant a few coins for him; he made a regular visit to our house and the two used to dance. That was the real starting point for Bala's dancing mania.
Balasaraswati
Very few people ever had the opportunity to see Cézanne at work, because he could not endure being watched while at the easel. For one who has seen him paint, it is difficult to imagine how slow and painful his progress was on certain days. In my portrait there are two little spots of canvas on the hand which are not covered. I called Cézanne's attention to them. "If the copy I'm making in the Louvre turns out well," he replied, "perhaps I will be able tomorrow to find the exact tone to cover up those spots. Don't you see, Monsieur Vollard, that if I put something there by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over starting from that point?" The prospect made me tremble.
During the period that Cézanne was working on my portrait, he was also occupied with a large composition of nudes, begun about 1895, on which he labored almost to the end of his life.
Paul Cézanne
He flew through the nets of Judaism, Calvinism, Aristotelianism and the Cartesian dualism, but nevertheless Descartes was his starting point. Could he have become Spinoza without Descartes? Did he beget himself, as Socrates did, or even as Hobbes largely was self-generated? Spinoza's "Nature or God" is not one of the Cartesian formulations, but Spinoza relies upon a number of Cartesian concepts.
Baruch Spinoza
Instead of engaging in this rather boring academic exercise of opposing Spinoza and Levinas, what I want to accomplish is a consciously old-fashioned Hegelian reading of Spinoza - what both Spinozeans and Levinasians share is radical anti-Hegelianism. My starting hypothesis is that, in the history of modern thought, the triad of paganism-Judaism-Christianity repeats itself twice, first as Spinoza-Kant-Hegel, then as Deleuze-Derrida-Lacan. Deleuze deploys the One-Substance as the indifferent medium of multitude; Derrida inverts it into the radical Otherness which differs from itself; finally, in a kind of "negation of negation," Lacan brings back the cut, the gap, into the One itself. The point is not so much to play Spinoza and Kant against each other, thus securing the triumph of Hegel; it is rather to present the three philosophical positions in all their unheard-of radicality - in a way, the triad Spinoza-Kant-Hegel does encompass the whole of philosophy.
Baruch Spinoza
"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. [...] We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.” - 22 August 2005, in a broadcast of his Christian Broadcasting Network's program, The 700 Club.
Pat Robertson
I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry about the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit's spout. And I came upon a section toward the end where Ahab stands at the rail and says: "It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.” I turned back to the start: "Call me Ishmael.” I was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare. I'd been in love with Shakespeare since I was fourteen. I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
Ray Bradbury
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
In one week I'll be thirty. Three-zero. Older than my Dad was when I was born. Older than Napoleon was when he ... did something that was probably extremely impressive at the time – I'm not a historian. I'm a composer. Sorry, a "promising young composer." I should have kids of my own by now, a career, but instead I've been "promising" for so long I'm afraid I'm starting to break the fucking promise.
Jonathan Larson
Hitchens: Let me ask a question to Mr. Heston. Can he tell me, clockwise, what countries have frontiers and borders with Iraq, starting from Kuwait?
Charlton Heston: Yes, indeed I can (...). Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, Russia ... uh, Iran.
Hitchens: Exactly. You don't know where it is, in other words, do you? You have no idea where the country is on the map, and you're in favour of bombing it now rather than later, on the whim of a president.
Bob Cain: Mr. Hitchens, if I may interject, I'm not sure [about the relevance] of the instantaneous command of the geography of a region.
Hitchens: Oh, I don't know. I think if you're in favour of bombing a country, you might pay it the compliment of knowing where it is.
Christopher Hitchens
I just want to be the best friend who comes in, steals the scene, and bounces ...and then use that small amount of fame to sell out theaters and play to bigger audiences...So as we were starting to write the show, I kept saying to [her co-writers] 'You know what? [Abishola] needs a funny friend ... a confidant.'
Gina Yashere
The starting point is that one is interested in the universe, one observes that one is finite and that this is intolerable. One has a limited time and apparently limited capacity with which to find anything out. Therefore it is possible to despair. There are many orders of despair, and none of them are known to normal psychology. This is demonstrated by the fact that it has not become existential. Normal psychology will never devalue anything. Existential psychology, at least to a certain point, consists of exploiting the recoil from the despair of finiteness. The recoil is a drive with at least the instinctive immediacy of the survival instinct. There is no point in saying, 'What is there to do? What could such a drive possibly tend towards?'. The survival instinct tends to prolong life. The fundamental drive tends to inform itself about the universe.
Celia Green
...gender is cultural: we have menarche to deal with, virginity, menopause, pregnancy, childbirth; these things are unavoidable. And in some places they've been wise enough to have ritual and ceremony about significant events. It is unfortunate in our culture-meaning north American mainstream culture-that all this has been minimized to the point where little girls are even afraid to say that they are starting to menstruate when they should be very happy. Grown women are afraid to say that they are approaching the menopause, when that means that they have lived a whole successful life. They've lived so long that they can have this...
Ntozake Shange
I think I can honestly say that if Olympia had announced her retirement because of ill health or to spend more time with Jock I probably wouldn't have run. ... What perked me up is why she is leaving. Olympia has 30 years of seniority, she's likable, she works very hard, and if she can't make it work, nobody in either party is going to make it work. ... I don't have any illusions it will be easy, but I do think particularly if the two parties are closely divided, I will have an influence ... I might have a chance of starting a movement toward change in this broken system. This country has serious problems, but you can't address them if the institution set up to address the problems is broken.
Angus King
In terms of writing, I just wasn't finding enough stories about contemporary African people-or historical, just anything, the whole gamut. I was raised in southern Africa and I came back to the West for college. I was starting to look for what I would like to perform, what I would like to see put to life onstage, and I was finding many stories about everybody else, but none about my own people. My playwriting became a "necessity being the mother of invention” type thing. I wasn't finding what I wanted to perform, so I started to create it myself.
Danai Gurira
If Clemente were a selfish player, he could hit 25 to 40 home runs a season. But he's always been content to set up a lot of runs for the fourth and fifth place hitters. That's why I always hit him third in the lineup. That has been my argument all along with the press. I've told the writers time and time again; nobody ever takes into consideration the amount of runs he sets up with singles and doubles. He takes great pride in hitting behind the runner and he does everything possible to help a ballclub. All the players look up to him. He helps a manager in so many ways, starting with spring training. When the young Latin players come into camp, he takes them under his wing and advises them as if he were their father.
Roberto Clemente
Bill and I were pretty much the same age bracket, and strangely enough, we both went through the same influences, starting with Nat Cole, going into Bud Powell during the bebop period, and then getting into the Lennie Tristano school orienta-in my particular case, Lee Konitz more than Lennie. I mean, in an era when everybody else was playing funky piano, we... I suppose, in a general category, that made us both the same. Whereby [sic] to my mind, we were both radically different. But after I put out that first album, the reviews started off by saying, "Clare Fischer owes much to Bill Evans." And then, when I would write an album, they would say "Clare Fischer owes much to Gil Evans." And I would call that my Evans brothers syndrome.
Clare Fischer
We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
Barack Obama
We saw in San Jose these protesters starting to pelt stuff [at] Trump supporters. That's not what our democracy is about. That's not what you do. There's no room for violence. There's no place for shouting. There's no room for a politics that fails to at least listen to the other side - even if you vehemently disagree.
Barack Obama
