Jon Lee Anderson Quotes

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.

You think the only people who are people, are the people who look and think like you. But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you'll learn things you never knew you never knew.

The library takes me away from my everyday life and allows me to see other places and learn to understand other people unlike myself.

Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.

People have compact to go beyond our own culture and upbringing to a degree that I think we don't acknowledge enough really.

I think we should all learn to listen more to America.

The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person.

I think that at the end of the day, when people understand the circumstances that led to the circumstances, they begin to sway their views.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

What do you imagine the American people would think of me if I wasted my time going to the ball game?

I don't see a lot of studio executives caring at all about what the culture is telling us. They think they make the culture. They're not out taking the temperature of things and using the results of whatever sort of cultural surveying they're doing to make movies. They're interested in doing things that people are already comfortable with, and taking those properties and filling them.

We have to understand that people are different. I don't know, if we really understand who we're dealing with over there.

I think it's naïve to think white people aren't singing along directly!

Hillary Clinton's unfavorable ratings at an all-time high at 60 percent. That Donald Trump is trusted more than she by the American voter. There's a very important attribute that goes to empathy and compassion in connective tissue with voters. The question of who cares more about people like you? That's a measurement that President Barack Obama beat Governor Mitt Romney on, like, 82 to 15. Clinton and Trump were tied on that. That's a remarkable figure when you think about how Democrats normally have an advantage in that way.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

If you're talking about coexisting and tolerance then you have to live by example, and you can't have shiny people all the time everywhere, which is what breeds that sort of thinking - this is better than this, that is better than that.

I think as much as possible, an artist, if he has any kind of social or political concern, has to…expose as much as possible what he sees so that some people think about things that they don’t normally think about… [Art] should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

I have always tried to sense the mood of the people, their needs, their attitude toward ways to solve problems, their priorities. That's mainly what I go by. And I think that's the most important thing in any person's work, in the work that the people of Russia entrusted in me.

It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.

I'm quite shocked and have been for quite a while as for the way people are treating each other. That's why I go out and I speak for the hungry, and if I see somebody needs a hug during the day, I'll go and give them a hug, and I think we should all use a little bit more of that.

The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.