Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.
There are a lot of films where I play characters that are about the windows to the interior person rather than the exterior.
God hears no more than the heart speaks; and if the heart be dumb, God will certainly be deaf.
Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon.
I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
It is better, as far as getting the vote is concerned, I believe, to have a small, united group than an immense debating society.
We wanted to make a powerful cello sound in order to show to the world the possibilities of the cello and to use it in a different way than the classical way they are used to. We wanted to play something exciting, something crazy, something to draw younger generations to this great instrument.
We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.
I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.
When you start using test audiences, it becomes more scientific than it is about the work itself, and that's boring.
A couple of taxi drivers have asked me if we can survive financially as an independent nation. I say, how come we are more stupid than Denmark or Finland or Sweden? They've all got the same amount of people. Are we all going to down tools? Is everybody in Scotland going to stop working?
The more normal it gets for people to see people of a gender or skin tone they wouldn't expect in jobs that they wouldn't expect, or speaking a way they wouldn't expect them to, the more it cultivates a sense that we share more than separates us.
I have learned more from my mistakes than from my successes.
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
I had, toward the last, been shut off from all visitors, and so when the lawyer, Peter A. Hendricks, came and told me that friends of mine were willing to take charge of me if I would rather be with them than in the asylum, I was only too glad to give my consent.
For restaurants that have a minimum gratuity charge on large groups, the IRS will now count those tips as regular wages rather than traditional tips that we are all familiar with when we dine out. Ask any server, and they will tell you that this will directly affect their day-to-day lifestyle.
Human rights are praised more than ever - and violated as much as ever.
The Tower of David is important for Israel's heritage and existence because it is more than a tower, it is a symbol. It is more important than the Azrieli Towers.
It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it's like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I'm not fighting. I don't have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.
I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.
Getting to do 'December Songs' in a cabaret-style format was so interesting because it's like a one-woman song cycle that actually tells a story. It feels like a theatrical experience more than a cabaret because I didn't talk in between. We went from one song to the next, nine songs in a row - bam - I told the story in half an hour.
There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.
I'm more of a tomboy than anything and then you see your name on these Top 50 Most Beautiful People lists and you're like, 'What?'
So you had to rev your engines, to beat the Russians and I think more than anything, if the Soviet team would win, or the Soviet athletes would win, you would see and hear and read about that. Quite frequently. So they would make a big issue of it.
I loved that it was about human relationships and then it was a mystery without falling into the trap of a thriller per se, because it pulled you in through people rather than through events or effects.
All my work is much more peaceful than I am.
The President's announcement sounded less like a national energy plan than like a page from an election-year play book. This Administration's plan to reduce obscene oil company profits is to regulate them less.
To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.
The cologne you pick should make you feel good when you go out with it. I think confidence comes across more than any other of our attributes.
What we are doing is taking advantage of the broadband Internet to provide basically unlimited free calls to anyone at a higher voice quality than they can with the phone lines.
In some people's eyes, nudity is so much more dangerous than violence. I never really understood that.
Even though other people wrote my songs I put my stamp on them. I have a connection, but there is no truer connection than an artists and their own song.
For the most part, romance is written in third person, and it's written in multiple points of view, so you're in the hero's head, and you're in the heroine's head. I've always said that I'm more of a narrator than a creator.
I don't like feeling vulnerable. I think my mum and dad's divorce affected me more than I let on.
We won the European Championship last September and now the world title. That is some year for French beach soccer! Now comes the hard part. We have to keep improving and that's difficult because it's tough to do better than winning a world title.
I think that always, as an actor, I don't want to overstep or pretend that I'm doing anything more than I'm doing.
