Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

The why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the how is what must command the living.

People get stupid when they're in love; people want what they can't have; and the years between ages twelve and eighteen always, always suck.

You just have to let yourself go and not be worried about what other people are going to say or the things that might come out...Just jump right in full force and be as silly and stupid and adolescent and introspective as you want to be.

[the Ghost Team] is an ensemble comedy. It's about people who are searching for meaning in their lives, and they end up doing this stupid thing after they're inspired by one another.

All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.

I thought that was a pretty stupid argument, really, because it's the final product that matters. The look of the film, however it's done, is still the cinematographer's vision in my mind. People said the same when color film came in, didn't they? The world evolves, and image-making evolves.

Ghosts were just a way that some stupid people dealt with their dull lives.

You know, development sometimes is viewed as a project in which you give people things and nothing much happens, which is perfectly valid, but if you just focus on that, then you'd also have to say that venture capital is pretty stupid, too. Its hit rate is pathetic. But occasionally, you get successes, you fund a Google or something, and suddenly venture capital is vaunted as the most amazing field of all time. Our hit rate in development is better than theirs, but we should strive to make it better.

The world will not end. This is ridiculous. I think it's like 2000. It's a great trick to do business and earn lots of money because stupid people hoard things. This is a stimulator of the economy.

A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.

The most expensive care we can give, we're giving those Americans without insurance. It's kind of stupid that we're fighting the notion that we want to quit paying a hidden tax and be up front about covering people in a way that is cost-effective.

A congressman actually apologized to BP's CEO for the way the company has been treated. How stupid are you when the CEO of BP is in the room and people think you're the moron?

In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.

We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'.

What teenagers are ready to laugh at is the misery of other people.

Some people were born just so they could be buried.

‎"Do you know that nothing you do in this life will ever matter, unless it is about loving God and loving the people he has made?

I know how stupid people can be. I've played in front of 5,000 people that bought a ticket to my concert, and some guy who's bought a ticket decides he's going to throw a bottle at my head. That's a simple act of stupidity. That's not even defiance.

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

It seems that it is impossible to live without discovering the purpose of your life. And the first thing which a person should do is to understand the meaning of life. But the majority of people who consider themselves to be educated are proud that they have reached such great height that they cease to care about the meaning of existence.

We have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

My wife drives a couple of Cadillacs.

By sharing something, I realized that I'm not alone, that there are a lot of people that share with me the same preoccupations, the same ideas, the same ideals, and the same quest for a meaning for this life.

Republicans stand by their convictions. Stupid, ignorant, world-destroying convictions based on disproven economic fantasies and ancient books full of primitive morality and magic people. But convictions, nonetheless.

And now, in the interest of equal time, here is a message from the National