Reagan has very significant things to teach us - positive lessons and quite negative lessons.
When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'
You should protest about the views of people you disagree with over major moral issues, and argue them down, but you should not try to silence them, however repugnant you find them. That is the bitter pill free speech requires us to swallow.
The priesthood of God is a shield. It is a shield against the evils of the world. That shield needs to be kept clean; otherwise, our vision of our purpose and the dangers around us will be limited.
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.
The ad industry thinks their clients are their customers. They think the companies who pay for the production are the ones they are supposed to serve. So the ads they produce make their clients happy... but infuriate the rest of us.
We all of us deserve happiness or none of us does.
When our interests matched, the Americans have been good to us, and when the interests differed, they wanted us to mold ourselves to them, which we refused.
The 200 years when Britain and the US were the top two economies were an aberration and that will change. The decline of empires has happened much faster than folks think. I believe that gold will be a far better bet in 20 years than the dollar.
You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.
Mitt Romney privatizes the gains from his enterprises, but spreads the costs to the rest of us. Seems that 'free stuff' is in the eye of the beholder.
In the West, people don't have any real problems. It's all based on bad conscience, a very Christian notion. I don't have any bad conscience. If there's a God that created us, if I am bad, it's his fault.
The theory of rights enables us to rise and overthrow obstacles, but not to found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements which compose the nation.
Quantum physics forms the foundation of chemistry, explaining how molecules are held together. It describes how real solids and materials behave and how electricity is conducted through them... It enabled the development of transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, LEDs, digital cameras and all the modern gadgetry that surrounds us.
After I changed the string we picked up right where we left off - and punched back in at the same time. I don't know if this has ever been done before. The engineer sort of looked at us weird, but we got it on the first take.
What satisfies me most are those nonverbal moments with players, when I sense them thinking and responding. And I think, 'Wow, this is amazing.' Hollywood gives us the money to do this. I want to be grateful for that, and I also don't want to waste it.
The last day of shooting, there were tears. It was this family that's grown together over the years. Many of us have worked on it since the beginning, so there's a sadness when we all go our separate ways.
I think, as long as people have a strong opinion, whether they love or hate us, I think we're doing something right.
Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
It is now such a complex society in terms of media. It just comes at us from every direction. You kind of have to push it all away.
The chaos can act as a magnifier of quantum fluctuations so that they can produce sizable effects in the world around us. But we know that that can happen often.
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
It is the forces of the universe that make human beings fall ill. Having learnt to recognize how sun qualities and moon qualities live in plants, animals and minerals, we discover how we can find counterforces and also individual natural forces that point us towards medicines for specific internal illnesses.
There is no reason inherent in the real resources available to us why we cannot move rapidly within the next two or three years to a state of genuine full employment.
Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.
We spent four days filming in a helicopter. I had never seen London from that viewpoint - you get a sense of how big it is and how easy it is to get lost. There was one day when we couldn't find Brick Lane: we spent 25 minutes looking and then realised it was directly below us.
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
I am an advocate of education. It is the panacea for all that ails us in our society.
I haven't travelled that much before so this is the first time I get to see the big cities of Europe. I've never even been to US.
Most of us don't confront pure anything. What our life does involve is a whole lot of 60/40 and 70/30.
Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.
It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.
Disobedience is essentially a prideful power struggle against someone in authority over us. It can be a parent, a priesthood leader, a teacher, or ultimately God. A proud person hates the fact that someone is above him. He thinks this lowers his position.
The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.
The economic and political roots of the conflicts are too strong for us to pretend to create a lasting state of harmonious understanding between men.
