Lawrence Tierney Quotes

I was associated with a woman who I was involved with and had a relationship with. She asked for money. I felt as though I was being blackmailed or there was some sort of extortion.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

Even the toughest guys are afraid to be anything outside of the toughest guys.

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

Authority, as you usually think of it, is merely the excuse the strong use to make others conform to what they want.

Who do you think is more difficult to face: oppressive governments, or oppressive societies?

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

What does it mean that social structures among young people are so often predicated upon trying really, really hard to appear to not-be-trying?

If some small storekeeper somewhere decides he's not going to pay the money, the Godfather doesn't let him get away with it. The money doesn't mean anything to him, but he sends in his goons to beat him to a pulp. You have to establish credibility, otherwise conformity to your orders will tend to erode. International affairs runs in much the same way.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.

If you do not join the dancing you will feel foolish. So why not dance? And i will tell you a secret: If you do not join the dance, we will know you are a fool. But if you dance, we will think well of you for trying. if you dance badly to begin and we laugh, what is the sin in that? We will begin there.

I feel like someone is pressing me into a mold that does not fit my body, forcing me intothe wrong shape.

In these days the young folks is all copy-cats, 'fraid to death they won't be all just alike; as for the old folks, they pray for the advantage o' bein' a little different.

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them, good or bad.

To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

If you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.

You can't please everyone. Just because I don't behave a certain way, some folks will say you don't have any street cred. I've pretty much had to put up with that since I was a little kid, just because I was raised to communicate in a certain fashion. Some people didn't like it.

Devoid of all romance, the music plays and everyone must dance. I'm bowing out.

We are not supposed to have an opinion. If we have an opinion, it has to be controversial – that is how we are always projected. It is difficult.

Everybody sacrifices something in an attempt to reach what they think society wants.

Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.