Toughminded Quotes & Sayings

I find the voice is what I look for first and foremost with just about every character I play. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Hunger was constitutional with him,
women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need
until he went to pieces.
The pieces sat up & wrote. They did not heed
their piecedom but kept very quietly on
among the chaos. — John Berryman

Life is now ... this day, this hour ... and is probably the only experience of the kind one is to have. — Charles Macomb Flandrau

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing? — Jaron Lanier

Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that's about it. — Meg Wolitzer

There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We hide in relationships. We hide in material possessions. We hide in ambitions, secret desires, hates, frustrations, jealousy, self-ptiy, in our insecurity - and more than anything our vanity and our egotism. — Frederick Lenz

I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. — Condoleezza Rice

On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it? — Sharon Tate

And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see. — John D'Agata

Humanity is as much lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court frequents bull and bear baitings; Elizabeth beats her maids, spits upon a courtier's fringed coat, boxes Essex's ears; great ladies beat their children and their servants. "The sixteenth century," he says, "is like a den of lions. Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking. Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fullness. If nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated. It is the entire man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid as he will under Puritanism. — William Shakespeare

The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy. — Todd Gitlin

We know that giving someone ideas as to what
they 'should' do and how they should 'change' to be
more effective, often has the opposite effect — Richard Boyatzis

A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story. — Chip Kidd

The downfall of any great nation ... always comes at the hands of it's pompous and insensitive leaders. — Timothy Pina