Shmear Quotes & Sayings

A fact which is not denied but whose truths are rationalized loses its objective base. It ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in defense of the class of the perceiver. — Paulo Freire

I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos. — Peter Greenaway

Thus, Symbolism and Decadence are not a separate new school which arose in France and spread throughout all of Europe: they represent the end and culmination of a certain other school whose links were very extensive and whose roots go back to the beginning of the modern age. Symbolism, easily deduced from Maupassant, can also be deduced from Zola, Flaubert, and Balzac, from Ultra-realism as the antithesis of the previous Ultra-idealism Romanticism and "renascent" Classicism. It is precisely this element of ultra - the result of ultra manifested in life itself, in its mores, ideas, proclivities, and aspirations - that has wormed into literature and remained there ever since, expressing itself, finally, in such a hideous phenomenon as Decadence and Symbolism. The ultra without its referent, exaggeration without the exaggerated object, preciosity of form conjoined with total disappearance of content, and "poetry" devoid of rhyme, meter, and sense - that is what constitutes Decadence. — Vasily Rozanov

We were freshman, taking her film class, and we'd spend hours after school sitting in her classroom talking about any old thing - life, sex, Forrest Gump. — Marisha Pessl

Great upheavals produce shock waves that widen cracks in political, economic, and security orders. Sometimes the old orders break. Yet it can be in the power of leaders and peoples to shape the directions of change. — Robert Zoellick

It disturbed me that he saw things in such black-and-white tones. I sure didn't. For me, the world was a confusion of color. — Dia Reeves

"Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out, But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe." — Stephen Hawking

venting anger does not solve the problem that anger signals. — Harriet Lerner

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie. — Jeanette Winterson

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet. — Clifford D. Simak

It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world ... by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves. — Ken Kesey

Probably spending 12 years at boarding school - comedy became a survival gene. But I think some people are funny right off the bat, as soon as they can speak or be naughty. — Eric Idle

I am a big Vespa enthusiast, and I enjoy the state park aspect of California. It's awfully nice to ride my little scooter through the mountains and then wind up at the ocean. — Deirdre Lovejoy

How you define an event produces emotion
and determines how you feel going forward — Derric Yuh Ndim

There was a time when hip-hop was its own musical principle, aside from sampling. Like the entire Wild Style break is instrumental. Kurtis Blow's earliest stuff was studio musicians playing. Whodini had a real clear sound, things like "five minutes of funk," stuff that you could write really beautiful, lush string and horn arrangements around, stuff that was just music. — Mos Def