Years Quotes - Page 205

You will never have great tennis champions from England because of the cold and dark, but most of all because people only care about the sport for two weeks a year, and then they're on to something else. There's just not a great love of the sport there

I was in jail four and a half years. When I came out, I continued the same struggle against injustice, but instead of using weapons, I began to use art and cinema.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously conservative group. They are a minority in Egypt. They are not a majority of the Egyptian people, but they have a lot of credibility because all the other liberal parties have been smothered for 30 years.

If our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won't have much strength and, eventually, we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a 'robust strategy.'

For thousands of years humankind's finest minds have been struggling with the theoretical problem of finding the forms that would give peoples the possibility, without the greatest of torment, without internecine strife, of living side by side in friendship and brotherhood. Practically speaking, the first step in this direction is only being taken now, today.

I had hoped to let the one-half cent sales tax sunset this year, but we do not believe revenues will grow as fast as we hoped for the rest of the year.

I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.

If you are British, you soon get used to people not loving you. The Irish remind us of offenses from 100 years ago. Perhaps we should react to what the French did to us even longer ago.

Who would have guessed that the shots heard 'round the world 225 years ago would fall on deaf ears in a nation now more sympathetic to the gun-grabbing Redcoat than the gun-bearing rebel?

You can forgive your leaders for not knowing the intricacies of Islamic history. You cannot forgive them for not knowing their own. And when you look at American democracy, where did it start? It started, if you need to pick a point, at Runnymede in 1215. We have now been at this process, we and our English-speaking allies, for 800 years.

If you look at football over the last 50 years there has been a gradual decrease in goals, you don't see too many 10-nils these days, but two, three or four goals per game is a good spectacle.

You have to have access to ideas. The Internet is facilitating that access to ideas. In 25 years, the way that data's going to flow back and forth, we don't quite understand yet.

Why does a three-year-old, and it's usually boys, want to drive the tractor or have machinery and be in control of it? I don't know. Why wouldn't you ask to boil a kettle or something? Maybe you would, I dunno.

I am delighted to be back home in Galway, the place I first came to as a 19-year-old in 1960. It's here where my heart is and will forever be.

For years I've kept a list of dream projects.

A lot of people relate my success now with The Voice, and it has nothing to do with that. I've definitely worked my ass off for a year afterwards trying to get that off of my forehead. If anything, it's actually harder to get labels to look at you when you come off a show like that, and it's harder for people to look at you like a real artist.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

What I envy most about you and everyone else heading back to school is the certainty of it all. You’ve got a prescribed set of requirements to guide you through the next few years. Focus your energy on the completion of those assignments and you’ll succeed. Guaranteed. Where’s my syllabus to guide me through life?

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

It was like a miracle. I'm just feeling fabulous. What's incredible is someone has given your life back. I'm out in the garden today. This time last year I was looking out a window at a hospital.

Bentley and Lamborghini have been achieving record sales for years. This doesn't support the notion that these models are suddenly social pariahs. There will always be a place for these kinds of cars.

A few years ago, I won a Tony for Little Me and I learned two important lessons from that experience. 1. Fair-weather friends are so much more interesting to be around and 2. It's amazing what this award fetches on E-Bay.

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.