C. L. R. James Quotes

The popular Arab imagination is a pliant and inventive thing; it can explain any defeat. It is a compass that always points toward the Jew.

A Children’s Museum, however, is more of a Funatorium. You are encouraged to touch things, which is poor training for subsequent museum visitation.

The same people who accuse America of coddling dictators are sputtering with bilious fury because we actually deposed one.

Ah, if only the best place for storing embryonic stem cells was Yucca Flat.

From Day One the very existence of [Camp Bravo] has been a popcorn hull in the tender gums of the hard left.

Contempt for the things people choose of their own free will is, at its heart, contempt for free will.

And I don't want posture lessons from a country that spent the last 20 years flopping on its back and grabbing its ankles when Saddam showed up waving stacks of Francs in exchange for bang-sticks.

The mind forever turns on the lathe of its own contradictions.

I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.

If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.

I'd been on all the television programs as an actor, as a writer, as a director, as a producer.

I became an actor by accident, not by design.

I'll miss it until the day I die, and I'm convinced to this day that I can get on a horse and jump a course of fences satisfactorily. It doesn't leave you.

I became a professional actor in Detroit and I was able to earn some money. It was a good job because it permitted me to study. It fit perfectly with school.

Always accepting the greatest joy of all is the time that I get to spend with my wife.

I love writing. I like reading, other people, not myself.

They change. They're different. There are no two alike, that's the miracle of it. But if they have something to teach the students. You can see them writing during the show.

Hackman is able to live in the moment which means there is nothing for him at that split second than what is occurring in the scene.

Landing the airplane I think is the most difficult thing that I've every learned to do in my life.

I will endure until the stars wink out & the very last trace of heat ebbs from the cosmos & there is nothing but eternal icy nothingness

The future is a strange monster. The less there is of it, the more it frightens.

What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.

By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.

For each of our actions there are only consequences.

Ask almost anybody if they think the climate?s changed in the last couple of decades and they will all say ?yes? and give you lots of examples.

You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don't say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science

Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.

I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.

If leadership is, fundamentally, about serving others, then any one person should be able to move between being a "leader" and a "follower."

Many people have a very hard time truly believing that doing the right thing by others, striving to serve them to the greatest extent, can actually be a competitive advantage.

Theodore Roosevelt is a natural choice for leadership education. Along with many other observers, I believe he was among the greatest of leaders to serve as president.

Any gathering of people requires leadership to cohere, to achieve its potential contribution. What is not needed is a "boss" of yore, directing everyone else's efforts toward "the one best way."

Ronald Reagan memorably combined intimacy with distance.

Ronald Reagan was unusual in being an authentic personality. Unlike many professional actors - and politicians - he was much the same behind the curtain as in front.

Theodore Roosevelt crafted a masterpiece of service. He served people in every aspect of his life. His legacy was transformational, encompassing his family, his nation and the world.

Ronald Reagan's career was so unusual, so unprecedented, that this would be very interesting to learn, to gain understanding of his way of looking at the world.

William Ewart Gladstone is credited with the credo that a prime minister must be a "good butcher." The metaphor is apt insofar as the root of the word "decision" is "to cut."

In a time when our nation is engaged in multiple, long-term wars, it's critical that "the military" not become an abstraction to the vast majority of Americans who are not participants.

President-elect John F.Kennedy said to Robert McNamara that there's no school for presidents, or, for that matter, for secretaries of defense.

One of the greatest misconceptions about Theodore Roosevelt - in his time and ours - is that he was impetuous.

My books arose from my own experience, when I sought guidance in practical leadership in my career. In sum, I strive to write the kind of book that I would find valuable in my own life.

William McKinley has surely been underrated - in no small part because he was succeeded by a memorable leader, Theodore Roosevelt.

California is, in many respects, best understood as a nation-state. In the environmental-energy realm, California possesses far-reaching legal authorities that other states do not.

I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things.

All great writers begin with a good leather binding and a respectable title.

Our life is a book to which we add daily, until suddenly we are finished, and then the manuscript is burned.

It is very well to be able to write a book, but can you waggle your ears?