My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.
I never, ever decided that I had to write a novel because, to me, there’s no such decision that ought to be made. It’s only something that I felt compelled to do, and it began to evolve.
I don’t think you ought to walk into this country one day, and the first stop you make is the welfare office.
Today we ought to be able to see first that Booker T. Washington faced a situation in which he was seeking desperately for a way out, and he could see no way out except capitulation.
I think there’s plenty of evidence that we need to stop spewing so much carbon into the air, that we’re contributing to climate change and that we ought to look for alternatives.
No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.
They want the Olympics. We ought to make sure they don’t get the Olympics.
I don’t think anybody feels like they’re a good parent. Or if people think they’re good parents, they ought to think again.
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
While in the Florida legislature, I strongly opposed the Stand Your Ground law because I believed it would provide defenses to people who had created the scenarios they sought protection from. Or it would leave juries without the proper rules of engagement that ought govern predictable human interactions.
I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.
Any Reform Bill which is worth a moment’s thought, or the smallest effort to carry it, must at least double, and it ought to do much more than double, the representation of the metropolitan boroughs and of all the great cities of the United Kingdom.
The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.
It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.
You spend so much time in your profession it ought to be something you love.
Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don’t do to other nations what we don’t want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?
He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.
Bills ought to be passed with deliberation by committees. Change should be achieved in a bipartisan manner. Incrementally, day by day, we should reach a consensus – not perfect, by any means – but something that we can be proud of, nonetheless.
We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.
Prize-Fighting is not the aim of boxing. This noble exercise ought not to be judged by the dishonesty or the low lives of too many of its professional followers. Let it stand alone, an athletic practice, on the same footing as boating or football.
We give the military money, it ought to be to kick rears, break things, and come home.
When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‘Calculus for the Practical Man.’ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.
To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
Certainly, every student and school ought to have standards and evaluation, but who sets those standards, and who writes the test? Whoever controls the test controls the school.
The moment I was introduced to my wife, Emma, at a party I thought, here she is – and 20 minutes later I told her she ought to marry me. She thought I was as mad as a rat. She wouldn’t even give me her telephone number – and she wrote in her diary: ‘A funny little man asked me to marry him.’
And there should not be a limit on the creation of new public schools. We ought to expand choices for parents.
The church is in the hope business. We, of all people, ought to be known most for our hope because our hope is founded on something deeper than human ability or wishful thinking.
There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.
Too many pitchers, that’s all, there are just too many pitchers Ten or twelve on a team. Don’t see how any of them get enough work. Four starting pitchers and one relief man ought to be enough. Pitch ’em every three days and you’d find they’d get control and good, strong arms.
The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.
A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I’m every inch a painter.
Lives of great men oft remind us as we o’er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us – Letters that we ought to burn.
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 – 20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.
They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.
People who act like angels ought to have angels to deal with.
Any political party that undertakes to do it will, in God’s name, be trampled, as it ought to be trampled, into the dust of condemnation, now and in the future.
What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
You ought to love what you’re doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it.
I really truly worry that the debt is one of the single biggest threat to the United States of America, that we’re talking about a problem that is multi-trillion in its depth and I think we ought to be cutting more.
We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.
One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don’t know what they are doing.
When the intelligence is making a policymaker too happy, he ought to challenge it, and even if he doesn’t, the intelligence briefer needs to launch a red team against his own conclusions to see if he can hold his ground.
He that desireth to acquire any art or science seeketh first those means by which that art or science is obtained. If we ought to do so in things natural and earthly, how much more then in spiritual?
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
The world and that which, by another name, men have thought good to call Heaven (under the compass of which all things are covered), we ought to believe, in all reason, to be a divine power, eternal, immense, without beginning, and never to perish.
We ought to ban hunting, I suggest, if there isn’t a purpose other than sport and fun. That should be against the law. It’s time now.
When I got out of the hospital, it was one of those classic things – you’re looking death in the eye, and it changes you. I thought, I ought to go back on the road.
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
The fact that we die is one of the more interesting things that happen to us. Fiction ought to be about bottom lines, and that’s as bottom-line as you can get.
I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn’t work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise.
I add, that those who are bent on restoring the whole church ought to be well instructed in the word, and to abstain from doing anything under the pretext of simplicity.
I think every religious person should have a deep sense of respect for other people’s religious documents and religious symbols just as we were deeply opposed to the Taliban destroying the two historic buddhas which they blew up. So I think we ought to all oppose burning the Koran.
