Orson Welles Quotes

I don't think we've ever lived in such a dangerous time, on a range of different levels. We also live in an extremely exciting time with a multitude of opportunities for each and every one of us to engage our individual voices, to engage more effectively collectively, to tackle some of these issues that would have seemed beyond our reach just a few years ago.

I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.

I think there [on Cuba] is going to be an extraordinary reception.Cubans are - they want to hold onto their culture, their heritage, but they also want to embrace this opportunity, perhaps, for new economic freedoms.

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

There are two things that have been true throughout history in big hunks. You can find differences in ten years, but in 50 year hunks, 100 years hunks, you'll find two things to be true. One, the world is always getting better. Two, people always think it's getting worse.

Of course, no-one thinks the EU is perfect. In recent years, the pace of social reform has slowed. But staying in offers the chance to rebuild a vision of Europe for workers, regardless of the passport they hold.

Antiracism is not "my" campaign. I have been doing antiracism organizing, activism, educating and writing for 20 years, in one form or another, but it's not a personal crusade. My work is part of a larger tradition, and larger effort, involving mostly people of color, and of course some white allies as well.

If you look at my career over the past twenty years, I've always been trying to look around corners for low-income communities of color.

I feel I need to really think about whether there's a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don't think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.

I just think that a much more important part of the problem we face, which was evident 10 years ago and is even more evident now, is that the way we share information among ourselves as American citizens has been radically transformed. The line between news and entertainment has almost dissolved, where ratings now have a big impact on what kinds of stories are covered and not stories.

I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.

Policy, for the most part, has been made by white people in America, not by people of color. And they have tended to take care of those things that they think are important. Whether it's their agricultural subsidies, or other kinds of expenditures that are certainly not expenditures for poor people or for people of color. And so we have to band together and keep fighting back.

I hope progressive ways of thinking will permeate the "mainstream" more and more in the coming years. Goddess knows we have endured a very long spell (thirty plus years) of regressive thinking and hyper conservativism dominating our culture and national discourse. It necessitates risk taking and rule breaking by people in all walks of life to swing that pendulum back though.

There's plenty of film out there, and quadrillions of cameras that use film - I don't think it makes much sense not to use it. The thing that's going out is the manufacturing of the paper. Incidentally, all these years my wife has told me that I'm color-blind.

I think the Russians might do away with the terror in twenty or thirty or years, when they are richer, and when they don't need these repressive methods so much.

There's been a 40-year effort on the far right to build up think tanks, academic programs, advocacy groups, to push a particular ideology. That's really where the impact is that people don't see.

We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are.

I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived. And a revolution has some sense of a long time frame, millions of years that we've been evolving on this planet.

What happened in the following years? Well, I think that among the educated classes it stayed the same. You talk about humanitarian intervention, it's like Vietnam was a humanitarian intervention. Among the public, it's quite different.

There's a real connection between the history of print in Europe and nationalism, and how those two things could be formed. I think they may both now be ending, for good and bad, but I think mainly for good. Either globalism was supposed to make people all realize this is one big business going on and we should know what's going on everywhere, or it makes people say, "I don't want to become part of this thing. I want to be incredibly different from you and I want to uphold my local behavior." Dress a certain way.

Look at the black population of America, if I dare say so. That's what I was thinking of a moment ago. Look at the people who have invested the Democrat Party for 50 years, look at 'em. How have their lives improved? They haven't.

I think it's important that all 50 years of rock 'n' roll live in the same place, because it's all connected.

I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.

I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.