Rowan Atkinson Quotes

I think President Obama is a committed, practicing nonideologue. He's consumed by neither tactics nor ideology. He is more concerned about outcomes than he is about process and categorizations.

Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn't like to have enemies around him.

I've found that balance is key. I'm no longer an extremist in any one direction.

I do not come bearing a party label on my sleeve - or a quick fix in my back pocket. I do not come with a rigid ideology in my heart - or a soul that tells me to go it alone. I do not come to uproot tradition - or to be imprisoned by it.

Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure.

I'm not an extremist, you know.

While splendidly progressive it is at the same time, amply conservative and sound.

Most Americans reject an absolutist sense of religious or political truth.

Extremes can be right on no side.

I'm conservative on some things, and I'm not on others.

I like to be an optimist, but I like to be a realist, too.

I'm certainly not a hard liner, that's clear.

I don't eat a ton of pasta or bread. But I eat dessert almost every night, and I drink. You need a bit of balance, and I've found mine.

People ask me if I'm liberal or conservative. I say neither - I'm pragmatic.

I've always been really selective. I just didn't have the right to be as selective in other years, I guess. It's very difficult to commit so much of your life to go shoot something that you think sucks, so I'd rather do nothing than go work on something that I really hate. Obviously, there are moments where you have to take jobs for money, everybody needs to pay their rent or whatever.

The alternative to fanaticism and to death is not some miraculous realization that someone has been wrong and he has to apologize. No, the answer to fanaticism and to death is curiosity and compromise and concession.

Normally I don't compromise at all but it felt important to give that song the chance to be heard.

People ask me, "Are you right wing or are you left wing?" and I always say, "I'm for the whole bird." A one-winged bird didn't ever get off the ground.

[Donald] Trump, I think, is the sort of guy that if he maybe thought he'd made a little bit of a mistake, would find a way out, he wouldn't want to say, "Well, that's what I've done and I'm sticking to it, and I don't give a damn." Which is what the other people in America would be like.

I'm convinced that the most important division in human affairs is probably not the one between left and right, liberal and conservative. It's the one between zealotry and understanding, between absolute conviction and compromise, between preachers and politicians.

In the theater, which is a sort of jungle, one does have to be a little bit careful. One mustn't be so rigid or egotistical to think that every comma is sacrosanct. But at the same time there is the danger of losing control and finding that somebody else has opened a play and not you.

I am no one to be a purist.

It's impossible for me to feel like there's only one way to do a thing. There's nothing wrong with having one way of doing it, but I think it's a bad habit. I believe in range. Like, there's a lot of tunes that I play all the time-sometimes I hear 'em in a different register. And if you don't have complete freedom, or you won't let yourself get away from that one straight line, oh, my goodness, that's too horrible to even think about.

I always keep my options open. I always say, "Make me an offer and send me the script, and if it's something that I can connect to or relate to..." The character has to intrigue me, and the project overall has to intrigue me. And if it all lines up properly, then we can get into the business side of it. But it's always about the creative first.

I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists. Compromise is not popular. It's not at all popular among young people who these days call themselves "activists." They think compromises are dishonest, opportunistic, humiliating. Not in my vocabulary. In my vocabulary, the word "compromise" is synonymous to the word "life".