Patriotism has served, at different times, as widely different ends as a razor, which ought to be used in keeping your face clean and yet may be used to cut your own throat or that of an innocent person.
In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.
As a member of the House Committee on Small Business and because of my own experience as a small business owner, I am appreciative of the impact these small businesses have on our local economies.
I was digging in the backyard to get my own clay and making pottery. And then I started taking pictures and built my own darkroom. I would go out at six in the morning and just take pictures.
So ultimately, it's idealistic to think that artists are able to step away from the power of the media and the way it controls things, and go on doing their own things.
You can look at anything as a cult. Churches are cults in their own way.
Everybody has their own way of tapping into their realness.
One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.
Because everything we say and do is the length and shadow of our own souls, our influence is determined by the quality of our being.
If you only believe that you're an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that's quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.
It means that Tao doesn't force or interfere with things, but lets them work in their own way, to produce results naturally. Then whatever needs to be done is done.
My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.
We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.
I am especially grateful that I have been able to keep my own style over the decades, in spite of the many changes that have taken place in the world of fashion and in its business.
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable. I think it's awful.
Whether I do jazz or R&B, there are always complaints. I would just listen to the complaints about what I do instead of celebrating what I do, and that I'm different and in my own lane. It took a while for me to just ignore the doubts.
A woman's body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother's, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went into and out of it, and as I grew up, I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself.
I grew up in a life where the answer was always there, I guess. But now I'm out on my own and still looking for the answer. Nothing is solved for me.
I used to own a dingy and can still sail one if pushed, but I like the pleasure boats.
Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.
For me, I was literally trying to stay afloat. I never actually thought I would get my own sketch show. So the idea that one day I would have my own show is pretty wild. But once I got it, I thought, 'Yeah, this is exactly what I always wanted to do.'
Today, we can see with our own eyes what global warming is doing. In that context it becomes truly irresponsible, if not immoral, for us not to do something.
What's been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a 'playbook.' In American football, a playbook contains a sports team's strategies and plays. It struck me that every region needs its own industry playbook on how to compete globally.
My life and career is my own adventure.
An actor with a genuine gift has the power to transport you from whatever your own pains may be into an entirely different world, freeing you from whatever you may be going through. At its best, it can be better than any medication.
The naturalists of our own time hold equal faith in the wonders of the sea, but seek therein rather for the links of nature's chain than for apparent exceptions.
Most people learn to improvise on their own, listening to records, endless hours of noodling on their instrument in the bedroom with all their spare time. That's traditionally how people learn.
Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.
I have started exploring my own life and have started valuing myself. I have started valuing my individuality.
People come up to me all the time and say, 'Oh, I love to watch Food Network,' and I ask them what they cook, and they say, 'I don't really cook.' They're afraid, they're intimidated, they know all about food from eating out and watching TV, but they don't know where to start in their own kitchen.
I think as an actor you're lucky to have any film take on a life of its own long after it's left the theater.
I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.
I'm less interested in the inside of whatever it is I own than on the outside of what it sits on.
