Top 460 Material Quotes

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another.

I was the child at school in second-hand or handmade clothes and, as I grew older, I craved material wealth, a big house and designer clothes.

The worst thing that an actor can do is go into any project with a lack of respect for the material. You can have an opinion about it, but you have to respect yourself in doing it.

Making a record? You’ve got to have the song, then you create a record. I think it’s the same with a live performance. If the material is strong, you’re already 90% there. I always tell young people it’s all about the music, the songs. Work on the songs, work on the songs, work on the songs.

I never want to be in a position where I have to defend my material. It’s too subjective. It’s for other people to defend or not defend.

Just because you’re a star on television doesn’t mean that you can be a music phenomenon or an artist. You have to have the material to back it, and it’s all about hit songs. I can name you every ‘Idol’ winner and why they didn’t go on to have success – their songs. The ones who have – their songs.

One of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with in my career is keeping my material topical even though I only release albums every three or four years.

With ‘The Tudors,’ I had a huge amount of material, I mean so many books and so much stuff about what they really said. So, in a way it was kind of trying to strip it out and find the stories inside all this material.

We are cannibalizing our audience by only giving them regurgitated material. Every movie is either a remake, a sequel, based on something else. Based on a former television series. Based on a successful videogame.

I would make the movie industry more like the television industry. TV is more material driven. In TV, you can break new stars. TV can take more chances.

A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

Enchanted partnership begins with the conscious understanding, on the part of two people, that the purpose of their relationship is not so much material as spiritual, and the internal skills demanded by it are prodigious.

And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.

I look forward to having the time and the opportunity to take on new challenges, but I’m also aware that I’ve loved every minute of the ‘Potter ‘experience: to make films for an enthusiastic audience and work with great material.

Most actors want to sink their teeth into amazing material.

The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted.

I look for material that both interest me and challenges me. If I am drawn to the material and I have to work hard at it, the characters and the plots reflect the hours and hours of research.

I didn’t do it for the money. I know a lot of people say that, but if I’d wanted to be rich, I’d have stayed working as a city lawyer. I gave that up eight years ago and took a massive drop in salary, and I didn’t mind because I was doing what I loved. There’s plenty of material for the other five books.

Nasser Hussain is brilliant. I am very impressed with him. With no disrespect to the current players, he has had to work with material which is not of the highest quality.

What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes.

The calling of art is to extract us from our daily reality, to bring us to a hidden truth that’s difficult to access – to a level that’s not material but spiritual.

Color is whatever comes out of the material and keeps it what it is.

Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks.

Despite claims by some to the contrary, we have heard numerous times in hearings and briefings by experts that existing technologies do not fully or effectively detect nuclear material.

It doesn’t matter so much where the material comes from, as long as it’s good.

Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.

I worry that business leaders are more interested in material gain than they are in having the patience to build up a strong organization, and a strong organization starts with caring for their people.

I’m more interested in seeing what the material tells me than in imposing my will on it.

Standardized tests don’t care if you’re white or black, short or tall, or even the rate at which you learned the course material. At the end of the day, all it cares about is whether you know what you’re supposed to know. It can’t be cheated, bent, or bargained with.

I think people assume I only do light things because of the movies that are like ‘Hairspray’ and ‘John Tucker Must Die.’ But I think it’s all just based on material that I really like and that speaks to me.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything – reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

We’ll get material in there and all of a sudden I’ll switch the material around or the order of the show.

Ethiopia shall once more arise from the ashes of material ruin to the heights of temporal glory.

I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren’t hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they’re excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.

I think it’s outrageous if a historian has a ‘leading thought’ because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.

Generally speaking I would say I enjoy the smaller films more because there’s a less sense of pressure and often the material is more unusual.

I find it difficult to judge myself, but people say that I have become a bit more socially acceptable over the years in terms of my material; which apparently at the beginning – though I never really intended it to be – was man hating and now is just a bit more cuddly.

I’m really not good blackmail material.

Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

You definitely pick stuff up when you go back and listen to older material.

We had a certain kind of material that was not dangerously esoteric.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.

The older I get, the less I obsess about material stuff. In fact, stuff has become the enemy. There always seems to be more of it than I have storage in my house!

Men are not great or small because of their material possessions. They are great or small because of what they are.

Each of us is a spirit in material form.

I was desperate for new material, so anything I can write a joke about that works is in the act. No matter who it offends, or who it bothers – doesn’t matter if its something my wife hates.

The First Amendment is not an altar on which we must sacrifice our children, families, and community standards. Obscene material that is not protected by the First Amendment can and must be prohibited.

I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one’s life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.

I continue to meet people who have had their Web pages hijacked, their browsers corrupted, in some cases, their children exposed to inappropriate material from these dangerous programs hidden in their family computers.

What you don’t get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.

I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.

My father lived by the philosophy, ‘Be yourself, because everyone else is taken,’ and he made sure I did, too. Whatever I wanted to do, he supported me. I don’t mean that I was spoilt – he didn’t believe in material gifts – but he watched my back while I worked to achieve things.

I’ve always had a bazillion songs in my archive, but I want to play people stuff they know. Now that I have two albums’ worth of material, that gives me freedom to compose a set that’s more well-balanced and build a show rather than just a recital of some songs.