Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.
When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.
This is political, not economic. The coal miners came out because they were not paid. The people coming onto the streets of Moscow are very well off. These are people protesting because they were humiliated. They were not asked. They were just told, "Putin is coming back."
Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life -- except religion.
Out of gifted and sovereign people, the regime made us little screws in a monstrously big, rattling and stinking machine.
We haven't had a connection with Iran since 1979. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War we had links to the Soviet Union. We are not talking to Iran, so we don't understand each other. If something happens it's virtually assured that we won't get it right, that there will be miscalculations which would be extremely dangerous in that part of the world. [...]
According to NHTSA, more than 3,000 people lost their lives last year in distraction-related accidents. It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving. No call, no text, no update, is worth a human life.
I just want them to know that if a skinny little farm kid from Lebanon, Illinois, with a chronic kidney ailment and no track and no weight room can eventually go on to make the Hall of Fame, then they can, too.
This is an asymmetric war. In asymmetric wars, you want to pit your greatest strength against the enemy's greatest weakness. Our great strengths are our ideals and our system of justice.
We're here to mark the end of this war, to honor the sacrifices of all those who made this day possible, and to turn the page, begin a new chapter in the history between our two countries -- a normal relationship between sovereign nations, an equal partnership based on mutual interests and mutual respect.
Write meaningful test cases... if your tests only prove the happy path, that's OK... but if they prove that the happy path is the only path... that is better.
The jury decided that I was convicted and I am accepting of it. I acknowledge it, and, of course, I am unbelievably sorry for it.
It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order. But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home; to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own culture. If the writer is unwilling to fill this part, then the writer should abandon pretense and find another line of work: become a shoe repairman, a brain surgeon, a janitor, a cowboy, a nuclear physicist, a bus driver.
For all your days be prepared,
I'm at peace with my God. I'm at peace with my wife, and she is at peace with me.
With respect to the number of deaths, arms manufacturers are charitable institutions compared to cigarette manufacturers.
I absolutely loved giving chase to celebrities. How many jobs can you have car chases in? Before Diana died, it was such good fun.
[The Court] is required, even after giving substantial deference to the views of the administrative agency, to be satisfied that it is not being used as a tool to enforce an agreement that is unfair, unreasonable, inadequate, or in contravention of the public interest. ... Applying these standards to the case in hand, the Court concludes, regretfully, that the proposed Consent Judgment is neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest. ...
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.
[The death penalty] has been carried out just twice in last 49 years in Oregon. Both were during my first administration as Governor, one in 1996 and the other in 1997. I allowed those sentences to be carried out despite my personal opposition to the death penalty. I was torn between my personal convictions about the morality of capital punishment and my oath to uphold the Oregon constitution.
Christmas creep (n):
Thanksgiving dinner successfully delivered to 14 people spanning 4 generations. Plenty to be thankful for, even if we didn't do it on Thanksgiving day.
I don't have as much enthusiasm this time as I did last time.
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
I've gone from being dead in June to being asked who will be in my cabinet. I think that's real progress.
I remember sitting at my desk in 7th grade on 11/11/71 and writing the date on a school paper. It struck me at the time that that was an awful lot of 1's, and, separated by slashes, a string of 8 very similar marks to represent the date. I thought about the only better date for that being 11/11/11, but that date seemed impossibly far away at the time.
The third agency of government I would do away with [pause], the Education, the, uh, Commerce, and, let's see [pause], I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. ... Oops.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in French about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "I can't stand him anymore. He's a liar."
Reforms? Where? Here?
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
If fighting starts between Pakistan and the U.S., we are beside Pakistan. If Pakistan is attacked and the people of Pakistan need Afghanistan's help, Afghanistan will be there with you.
If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there.
Probably the government in Washington could be trusted at one time, but now it seems like it's all a game of who wins rather than what's best for the people.
I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.
One day the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich.
I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. ... then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle, [who] blew the condor away. That's what a computer is to me... the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise -- to deny the political character of the modern corporation -- is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are the students who instruct in error. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed.
My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest. Both my children and I won what I call the ovarian lottery. (For starters, the odds against my 1930 birth taking place in the U.S. were at least 30 to 1. My being male and white also removed huge obstacles that a majority of Americans then faced.)
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
It is a moment of truth, and my people are waiting to hear the answer of the world.
Congratulations, I think, to my #4 daughter Brittany, who eloped this afternoon with her boyfriend Calvin.
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.
Que bonito es no hacer nada, y luego descansar (how beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward).
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.
This is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.
How can we escape from the trap that the terrorists have set us? Only by recognizing that the war on terrorism cannot be won by waging war. We must, of course, protect our security; but we must also correct the grievances on which terrorism feeds. Crime requires police work, not military action.
