Ornstein Quotes & Sayings

Government is inevitably going to play a very significant role in infrastructure, and in a country with a federal system where vibrancy and economic health depend on interstate commerce, it's not going to be private enterprise or state governments that will give you things like an interstate highway system. — Norman Ornstein

If I'm feeling something, I know if it's a song, or if it's a little story that I'm going to write, or if it's a painting or play. I might sit down and write a play. — Michael Marisi Ornstein

New research shows that emotions have a separate system of nerve pathways, through the limbic system to the cortex, allowing emotional signals to avoid conscious control. — Robert E. Ornstein

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract. — Leo Ornstein

But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple. — Leo Ornstein

Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express. — Leo Ornstein

Improvisation is terribly haphazard. — Leo Ornstein

Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called "moderate Republicans." Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a "radical insurgency" that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With — Noam Chomsky

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language. — Leo Ornstein

Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided. — Leo Ornstein

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing. — Leo Ornstein

I distrust anything that you don't hear. — Leo Ornstein

To the person that deals in visualizations, I suppose there is something rather exciting about a whole set of people - they all going symmetrically, up or down, in a military sort of precision. — Leo Ornstein

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best. — Leo Ornstein

Radicals don't care about the institutions. They are looking for an ideological crusade. Traditions don't matter. — Norman Ornstein

We have to shift our understanding of ourselves as separate individuals, each seeking our own welfare, to an understanding of how we fit into social, biological, and physical environments. — Robert E. Ornstein

Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear. — Leo Ornstein

Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing. — Leo Ornstein

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music. — Leo Ornstein

When the 'weaker' of the two brains (right and left) is stimulated and encouraged to work in cooperation with the stronger side, the end result is a great increase in overall ability and ... often five to ten times more effectiveness. — Robert E. Ornstein

A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide. — Leo Ornstein

I love people who are complicated, and I love playing people who are complicated. — Michael Marisi Ornstein

When I get a script and do my work, and then show up on set and work, it's the same zone that I'm in when I'm in front of a canvas, or when I'm writing a story about one of my paintings, or when I'm playing music. Whatever I'm doing at any given time, it's the same exact zone. — Michael Marisi Ornstein

Society would not tolerate legislation declaring that the theory that the sun circles the earth be given equal time with the theory of a heliocentric solar system; it should not pay attention to the equally preposterous notions of scientific creationism — Robert E. Ornstein

When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there. — Leo Ornstein

By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear. — Leo Ornstein

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get. — Leo Ornstein

Conservatives want smaller government. They want to focus on market-based solutions wherever one can. They want to have as little regulation as possible. But in general, they recognize that government must play an important role for a society to operate. — Norman Ornstein

I love being presented a character that boggles my mind. I have to do a lot of work and explore how I can make the guy absolutely real and absolutely believable to myself. And then, I go to work on doing that for other people. — Michael Marisi Ornstein

We're worse off than Freud thought, because many actions proceed without our knowing anything about them. — Robert E. Ornstein

Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that piece of music. — Leo Ornstein

Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent. — Leo Ornstein

I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music. — Leo Ornstein

To keep your resolve, surround yourself with those who want you to succeed. The brain cannot do its job of protecting the body without contact with other people. — Robert E. Ornstein

If you spend too much time being like everybody else, you decrease your chances of coming up with something different. — Robert E. Ornstein

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things. — Leo Ornstein

Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether. — Leo Ornstein

I'm a creative person and I use painting, acting, writing, writing songs, or whatever, as tools to just get a point across, in order to communicate a story or an emotion. — Michael Marisi Ornstein

The greatest surprise of human evolution may be that the highest form of selfishness is selflessness. — Robert E. Ornstein

In writing music, the structure of each piece is a very important factor. — Leo Ornstein

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising. — Leo Ornstein

I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden. — Leo Ornstein

This duality has been reflected in classical as well as modern literature as reason versus passion, or mind versus intuition. The split between the conscious mind and the unconscious. There are moments in each of our lives when our verbal-intellect suggests one course, and our hearts, or intuition, another. — Robert E. Ornstein

You write it down because finally, when it's written down you do get it out of your system somewhat. — Leo Ornstein

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment. — Leo Ornstein

Unconscious decisions for action go on constantly inside the head. — Robert E. Ornstein

Human inventiveness is overwhelming human adaptiveness. Our ability to judge lags behind our ability to create. — Robert E. Ornstein

The best way to get your audience larger and more consistent is to be more divisive and more radical and criticize those who cater to or kowtow to other forces. — Norman Ornstein

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know. — Leo Ornstein

But most of us, for most of our lives, do not try to determine the causes of things. Rather, most of the time we try to get by; to eat, sleep, and of course, to reproduce. In other words, we are mainly concerned with surviving, getting along in a complex and changing world, in short, with adapting rather than with interference. — Robert Evan Ornstein