William Powell Quotes

What happens if you stand passively by the side of the road with a placard saying, you know, 'Stop climate change' is you just get ignored. When you get on the street and block it, people start to have a conversation about this existential situation that we're in.

If you really want to make a difference you don't do it via Tweet, via Facebook, via Instagram - you get down, you understand what the facts are and then you offer a path forward.

Time's Up is finally, it would seem, activism with some teeth. It isn't perfect, however. One of the first acts of protest - urging celebrities to wear black to awards shows - reveals a worrisome willingness to keep lunging toward those lazy, meaningless and empty gestures that cheapen the seriousness of an issue.

Rallies, marches on Washington, protests, et al. are pointless if there is no action to make them mean something.

I accept that as an elected politician I have a number of other tools that I can use to bring about change but I would also say that the Green party remains committed to appropriate non-violent direct action and I think it is a tool in some cases that is legitimate.

The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate.

All the well-meaning advice in the world won't amount to a hill of beans if we're not even addressing the real problem.

We are valued wither too highly or not high enough; we are never taken at our real worth.

Real action is in silent moments.

Perfection is not necessary to make a real and lasting difference to other people's lives.

Real action and true helpfulness are perhaps the ultimate charm.

All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real.

I can never feel that setting fire to houses and churches and litter boxes and destroying valuable pictures really helps to convince people that women ought to be enfranchised.

McCarthy generally, as an individual, was a liberal. He was, in economic philosophy and a lot of other things, extremely liberal.

Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.

I think if you're a liberal, you believe that we all are, at least to some extent, our brothers' keepers, you really believe that we have a sumptuary responsibility to make sure that life is decent for everybody in America, that you believe that society out to be broadly shared, and you believe that you can't have a real democracy unless you have a little bit, at least, of economic democracy.

Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

Each recognized the fact that real commitment could be proven only through the passage of time.

It's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking.

Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.

Real knowledge never promoted either turbulence or unbelief; but its progress is the forerunner of liberality and enlightened toleration.

Peter Beinart excoriates the doughface liberals who during the Cold War put anti-imperialism before anti-totalitarianism and demanded total moral purity on the part of the United States, thus opposing any action in the real world to resist Soviet expansionism. If the Democrats were, as he advocates, to return to the Trumanesque anti-totalitarian liberalism that held sway in the party from roughly 1947 to 1972, the party and the country would be better off.

The ultimate test of practical leadership is the realization of intended, real change that meets people's enduring needs.

For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.

I guess I get enough real life, in real life, so that's why I like things that are more extreme.