We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.
Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That’s just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.
It is your passion that empowers you to be able to do that thing you were created to do.
It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming.
At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story. A young mother and a dutiful father with their baby were joined by poor shepherds and visitors from afar. They came with their gifts to worship the Christ child.
I opened Leith’s in Notting Hill in 1969 and it eventually worked its way into being awarded a Michelin star. At the time, there were a few women running small bistros – but I was the first woman to have a ‘serious,’ expensive restaurant.
My degree is in biology, and it will always be my first love. Evolution, ecology, genetics – they were the textbooks I was devouring as a teenager, and it was there that my love of science grew.
I am not someone who is ashamed of my past. I’m actually really proud. I know I made a lot of mistakes, but they, in turn, were my life lessons.
Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.
If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
I was chef to the French Presidents between ’56 and ’59, finished with de Gaulle, and during de Gaulle I remember serving Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, Macmillan; those were the heads of state at the time. I never saw anyone. No one would ever, ever, ever come to the kitchen. You couldn’t even see them.
If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms never never never!
I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were torture. They are not.
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago… I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.
When I was 12, my feet were so small, I wore my sisters’ glitter shoes. My dad would whoop me: ‘You’re not going to school now, you’ll embarrass us!’
Everybody said you’re never going to win this whole Classic. You’re not strong enough. You’re big, you’re athletic, you’re fast – but you will never win this Arnold Classic. Those were the people who didn’t believe in me… I put in the work every single day – and here I am, three times champ!
What you don’t want is for violence and gore to become more important than character and structure. A lot of slasher movies from the eighties were only focused on violence and gore, which robs the human beings in the story of any empathetic reaction from the audience, and instead makes them cheer for the gore.
I work as if I were going to be the next person to need a respirator. I share in the benefits I bestow on others, and my work has enriched my life.
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’ are standout tracks. ‘Comfortably Numb’ is another one. ‘High Hopes’ from ‘The Division Bell’ is one of my favorite all-time Pink Floyd tracks. ‘The Great Gig in the Sky,’ ‘Echoes,’ there’s lot of them.
Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.
Sometimes, I feel I am really blessed to be blind because I probably would not last a minute if I were able to see things.
Y’know, you can’t please all the people all the time… and last night, all those people were at my show.
The golden age was when people were starting to understand what hip-hop was and how to use it. I was lucky to come up then. Everybody wanted to be original and have substance; it was somewhat conscious… There was an integrity that people respected.
Marriage is an attempt to solve problems together which you didn’t even have when you were on your own.
Me and my sister made up a game called ‘Milky Cow’. We were on holiday in France when I was 12, and there was a kid who had bovine features, and every time we went past her, we’d say, ‘There’s Milky Cow’.
I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
There are many talented people who haven’t fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.
I’ll say initially acting was my first love, and that’s what I pursued. But then, so far as even my first day on a film set, and just watching how things were set up, I just said, ‘I think I want to be in charge.’ I am very much type-A. I am a bit of a control freak.
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn’t be happy if I were home all the time.
The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.
He was a very strict father, which in a way has helped me to become who I am today. He never pampered me, as he wanted me to live a normal life. No film magazines were allowed at home, and we weren’t allowed to watch any movies.
Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a person as if he were where he could be and should be, and he will become what he could be and should be.
Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
The moment in between what you once were, and who you are now becoming, is where the dance of life really takes place.
Mentors of mine were under a big pressure to minimize their femininity to make it. I’m not going to do that. That takes away my power. I’m not going to compromise who I am.
My mom raised us like we were still in the Philippines. She tried to cure everything at home like a real Filipino woman. You had to die to go to the hospital. My mom cured everything with Vicks VapoRub. I should’ve died nine times when I was a kid!
If poverty were a man, I would have slain him.
Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine, were taken away.
I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.
O! Desolated Scotland, too credulous of fair speeches, and not aware of the calamities which are coming upon you! If you were to judge as I do, you would not easily put your neck under a foreign yoke.
The middle of ‘America’s Women’ is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.
A country that cannot feed itself cannot have self-pride, and in the mid-’60s 20 percent of all the wheat produced in America came into India. We were agriculturally a basket case. And 15 years later, 20 years later, we have become an agricultural power. This is the famous Green Revolution.
My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.
I come from a long line of strong and confident women out of New Orleans. My grandmother and great-grandmother were women who ran their homes and were leaders in their communities. I was never taught that there was anything that I couldn’t do, and I believed that.
If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.
