Living is strife and torment, disappointment and love and sacrifice, golden sunsets and black storms. I said that some time ago, and today I do not think I would add one word.
My father longed for a better life for us, and when I was nine he got a job as a heart surgeon in Belfast. It was very bittersweet when we said goodbye to our relatives, and I remember crying my eyes out at the airport.
I think our society has sort of built this gender binary, and the way we’ve said it exists does not really exist in nature.
When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her ‘good name’ was. I think she’d heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, ‘Mona Ahmed Ali,’ the lady looked at me and exclaimed, ‘Oh, so you’ve married a terrorist.’
I ran five miles today. Then, finally, I said, ‘Here, lady… take your purse.’
Socialism and communism fall of their own weight because, as Margaret Thatcher said, you run out of other people’s money. Because socialized medicine never falls of its own weight because you put people on lists, and they die waiting to get the treatment and care. So you don’t go broke.
If I’m half as good as everybody said I am, I’m far too good to be wasting time with ordinary people. But I seem to be spending my life with ordinary people, who are the best people in the world.
My friend asked me if I wanted a frozen banana. I said ‘No, but I want a regular banana later, so… yeah.’
I’m not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
Someone said to me at a party once, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re a comedian? Then how come you’re not funny now?’ And I just wanted to say, ‘Well, I’m just going to take this conversation we’re having and then repeat that to strangers, and then that’s the joke. You’re the joke later.’
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
How can it be said we should use only constitutional means in our struggle, when all resistance is illegal and we have no way to change the brutal realities of the racism regime?
CBS news anchor Dan Rather has interviewed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. When asked what it was like to talk to a crazy man, Saddam said, ‘It’s not so bad.’
My grandmother lived to 104 years old, and part of her success was she woke up every morning to a brand new day. She said every morning is a new gift. Her favorite hobby was collecting birthdays.
If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, ‘You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing’, that I think is culpable. I don’t know how much more they expect me to be doing, I’d better ask them.
Bill Clinton was a brilliant politician. If President Obama was a brilliant politician he would have come out before the election and said ‘Hey we’re gonna cut taxes, grow the economy, what I’m doing’s not working, and we’re gonna change course’ like Clinton did.
As I said last week in the wake of the grand jury decision, I think Ferguson laid bare a problem that is not unique to St. Louis or that area, and is not unique to our time, and that is a simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.
I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
My girlfriend bought me a down jacket, she said it fit my personality.
I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.
I’ve said numerous times the hardest job in America isn’t being a professional athlete. It’s not being a matador or having some job that puts your life at risk. The hardest job in America is being black, because it’s the one thing you can’t outrun.
Everyone has a budget, I don’t care who you are. But they said if we are in a pennant race in the middle of the summer they are going to get some help with added payroll.
I’ve always said I was born in the storm. I just had to find a way out of it, find the clearing, and believe the clouds would blow away and the darkness would become something else.
I never said I was a ‘good girl.’ I’m not a bad girl.
I always try to see the good in everything, and that gives me strength. Even when I lost in the London Olympics quarterfinals, I said to myself, ‘Don’t lose heart, God has his own plans.’ Actually, life just goes on; you have to accept whatever challenge you face and become stronger.
We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat; I am the people.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free.
If my kids came to me and said, ‘I’m gay,’ I’d say, ‘Son, I love you.’ That’s never at stake. Never, never, never at stake.
So he said ‘I’m going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.’ I thought ‘That’s a turn-up for the books.’
In the White House, you can be on the pitcher’s mound or you can be in the catcher’s position. Put points on the board. Show people you can govern. Deliver on what you said you were going to deliver on.
I got into gambling when I was playing a casino. I was a hermit in those days. I would go onstage, go to my room, or if we had to travel, I’d get in a car or a plane, whatever. But I didn’t do anything. One day, this friend of mine said, ‘Do you want to play some blackjack?’
When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.
When it’s said and done, the one thing I want to leave on this earth is hope. I have felt hopelessness, and it’s a terrible feeling. Hopelessness will destroy you. I want to bring hope to other people.
I had to get out of the Boston area, so I flipped a coin and said, ‘Heads – Miami, tails – California. I was in my mid-20s and came out here with no training. Acting wasn’t even in my mind.
Success is always temporary. When all is said and one, the only thing you’ll have left is your character.
My mother said I would have more chances to become a tennis player than a football player.
I played a paraplegic on a show called ‘Neighbours.’ Just turned up on set, sat in a wheelchair. The producer came up to me one day and said, ‘We have to cut around that entire scene because your leg was moving.’
At the end of the day, I’m fighting for the things I said I’d fight for.
I was born Gaynor Hopkins, one of seven children. My mum, Elsie, and dad, Glyndwr, always said they had seven children, although my sister Paulene was stillborn.
Well done is better than well said.
I didn’t say I’m walking away. I said I was stepping down as chairman. I won’t walk away. I’ll be carried away.
It needs to be said and heard: it’s OK to be who you are.
President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.
I have simply said that there’s just a side of me that could not judge anybody singing. It’s not who I am. I don’t want to be that person.
In the main, ghosts are said to be forlorn and generally miserable, if not downright depressed. The jolly ghost is rare.
My teacher told my mum, ‘I think William has dyspraxia,’ and Mum asked what that meant. She said, ‘Well, if I put a chair in the middle of the room and asked every child in the class to walk around it, William would be the only child in the class to walk into it.’ Mum was like, ‘Yeah, that’s my boy’.
A girl phoned me the other day and said… ‘Come on over, there’s nobody home.’ I went over. Nobody was home.
I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn’t speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, ‘What? That’s your son.’
Fereydun, that’s my dad’s name. My grandmother, my dad’s mom, when she was pregnant, she was dating a man from Persia, a Persian gentleman. It wasn’t his child, but he was still very supportive and said, ‘Hey, this is a great name,’ and so it stuck. So that’s what she named him.
Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I’d like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.
I had a speech class in elementary school. And you know how teachers, when a kid is struggling to pronounce a word, used to lead him and say, ‘Johnny, sounds like… ? Johnny, sounds like… ?’ I said out loud, ‘Sounds like Johnny can’t read.’ Teacher told me to leave the room.
When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, ‘Well, what do you need?’
