Stephanie Coontz Quotes

Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure.

I've heard this theory that this is basically Jeb's [Bush] people trying to get their supporters to basically put the stake in Marco Rubio because if people are talking about accepting [Donald] Trump over [Ted] Cruz, what they're really saying is Marco Rubio's no longer viable.

Our [former] governor [Pat McCrory] was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar.

It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.

There's some people who say big philanthropy is not such a good idea, meaning that somehow you have enormous power and you're not elected and that that may not be such a good idea to have people with enormous wealth to have so much influence.

The idea itself, the notion of what the next Tron could be, is exciting enough that it would be worth going back to do it. Obviously we hinted some things at the end of Legacy, it's kind of there for people to see what that potential is. So we just want to make sure that we have a script that delivers on that promise on an epic scale."

To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Some people are stuck in tedious things, like their jobs, and they are bored. Other people experience one stressful thing after another.

Go into business, sell a product, sell a service, you're automatically a suspect to people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton - unless you donate to them, and then you become their closest friends, and then we get cronyism.

We have a politically correct military and it's getting more and more politically correct every day.

The idea of doing a period movie, some people say, "Isn't it odd that you're doing a period movie? That's a change of pace for you." And, I'm like, "Not really." When you're doing a science fiction movie, it's almost exactly the same.

Oh here's an idea: let's make pictures of our internal organs and give them to other people we love on Valentine's Day. That's not weird at all.

You don't want to be the smartest person in the room; you want to be the dumbest in the room. You want to be surrounded by other thinking people who are going to say something that makes you think, "Oh, my God, that's an amazing idea. Why didn't I think of that."

I don't look at people's expressions, because I still get nervous when I play, especially when I first put the harp up there. I just try to tune - it takes me a half-hour to tune, and I get nervous if I look at anybody when I do it.

Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.

What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

Once you convince people that they're victims, you really own them because you've just told them that whatever problems they have in life, it's not their fault. And then you're telling them they can't fix them by themselves. Look at your life. Your life sucks. You're a victim of these people here, you can't fix it. You need us looking out for you. "Us" being the Democrat Party in this case, the people that go out and get votes.

I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard.

There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.

With this show [Stand-Up Revolution ], I loved the idea that I would be picking the talent that goes on, not the network. It was me handpicking people who might not have gotten the chance to be on TV. So, I thought it was real cool that I was putting people up there.

We need saints; we need this head - this talking head - to communicate. Every single religion you have people that go in-between, that can talk to god or communicate ideas. Then there are the talking heads in the news every time we watch TV. No matter how complex, you still need a person there to tell you what happened: a storyteller of sorts. I find that fascinating that we feel so attached to this primitive mode of connection, this primitive interface to the world.

Some people want tolerance to mean now that all ideas are equally valid. That's nonsense. There are some things that are right and there are some things that are wrong.

Yeah, in every film that I've been lucky enough to do with Tim, there's always some form of torture, and the nails were Tim's idea. They were the length of the fingers and stuff, but it was okay because I had a troop of people who would help me go to the bathroom. They had to have treatment afterwards but they're okay now. That is true.