The courage of very ordinary people is all that stands between us and the dark.
What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I’m interested in how ordinary people live their lives.
I say I don’t need a tax cut. It will not do me any more good. I can’t buy more, I can’t eat more, I can’t do more, and I want it distributed among the ordinary people who work every day.
And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.
I have no sympathy for debunking human achievements that, in the end, gave ordinary people liberty.
We are determined to build a society defined by decency and integrity that does not tolerate the plunder of public resources nor the theft by corporate criminals of the hard-earned savings of ordinary people.
I’m drawn to ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, which is a big part of the human condition.
I think there’s a mythology that if you want to change the world, you have to be sainted, like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ordinary people with lives that go up and down and around in circles can still contribute to change.
Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less – certainly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt – got rid of them.
There’s another way of making music, by touching the lives and feelings of ordinary people.
I was once asked by Jeremy Paxman what is it about celebrity and said that people these days seem to think a celebrity is someone who has escaped the constraints of ordinary people: that they don’t have the same kind of problems, almost as if they’re classical gods.
I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation – that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.
I see my task as serving the majority of people. The question is, how do you find out what they want, how best to serve them? My answer is to stay close to ordinary people because, at heart, I am one of them.
Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don’t read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.
Credit expansion and money printing hasn’t filtered much to ordinary people. It’s boosted asset markets, real estate and stocks. So well-to-do-people have done very well.
By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.
I’ll continue on the path I’ve been taking, feet on the ground, describing people’s lives, describing people’s emotions, writing from the standpoint of the ordinary people.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
Ordinary people in such positions – working at firms, companies, or chains – have the absolute right to have their voice in the public square.
Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with.
I think if you touch ordinary people, they’re simply ordinary people, the way they’ve always been. They work hard, they don’t have really as much as they should.
Ordinary people understand that the rich and powerful bully the poor and meek.
It was a very rare moment in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear plant accident. Ordinary people went out to the streets to speak anti-nuclear sentiments.
The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few threatens the ability of ordinary people to raise their voices and have a say over how our societies are run.
Rock isn’t art, it’s the way ordinary people talk.
Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.
The economic dynamic in Zimbabwe is perversely robust: while ordinary people suffer, black-market dealers and people with foreign bank accounts prosper, making them powerful stakeholders in the perpetuation of devastating economic policies.
I’m drawn to stories about ordinary people who get tangled up in an extraordinary event or idea or emotion. I’m not saying I don’t love films about super-people or super-doctors, but my preference is for stories about how we get through this life, what it is to be human, because I’m always struggling with it myself.
There is little or no point being chair of the Labour Party and being ignored when engaging with Labour ministers when you’re trying to articulate something that affects ordinary people in society.
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
I’ve discovered I’ve got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
One of the reasons why I decided to participate in ‘HawthoRNe’ was I really wanted the opportunity to show how ordinary people do extraordinary things.
The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.
My books are about ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations who are able to draw upon their inner reserves to challenge the status-quo in life and navigate compelling human relationships.
Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person’s life. I’m not writing about superheroes; I’m writing about ordinary people.
The philosophical point is that our happiness and wellbeing is not based on incomes rising. This is not just the wisdom of sages but of ordinary people. Prosperity is more social and psychological: it’s about identification, affiliation, participation in society and a sense of purpose.
I agree with Kathi Zellweger that sanctions mostly punish the ordinary people who live at the edge of starvation.
I put ordinary people in jeopardy and give them the opportunity to be heroic. Then there’s a great payoff for the reader at the end, when the heroic character gets what he or she deserves. Readers will come back again and again if they feel satisfied at the end.
The colonial period has been the proving ground in America for the new social history, which concentrates on the ordinary doings of ordinary people rather than on high culture and high politics. Unfortunately ordinary people, almost by definition, leave behind only faint traces of their existence.
Now, perfectly ordinary people will give each other hugs. I mean, it used to be that a hug was reserved for if you came back from Australia – you know, back in the ’40s and ’50s.
Throughout his long career, Washington earned the adulation not merely of ordinary people but of the other luminaries whom we now hail as ‘founding fathers.’
Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn’t want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
The whole idea of ‘Secret Life of Muslims’ is that we’re just ordinary people. We’re your neighbors; we’re your coworkers. We like coffee, you know? We’re everyday normal people with hopes and aspirations and fears.
Look, I’m not a perfect person. I have my warts. I sometimes say things that get me in trouble. I wear suits that are cheap. But I say what I think and I believe what I say, and I’m willing to say things that are not popular but ordinary people know are right.
I keep saying my books don’t have superheroes. They have ordinary people in extraordinary situations.
Even very ordinary people, upon closer examination, can often look extraordinary.
I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh.
I’m one of these people who tends to think that the ordinary people are more fascinating than the celebrities and even the politicians.
Day after day, ordinary people become heroes through extraordinary and selfless actions to help their neighbors.
