Thomas Merton Quotes

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

The difference between me and people like Murray Rothbard is that, though I want to know what my ideal is, I think I also have to be willing to discuss changes that are less than ideal so long as they point me in that direction.

Can I say anything good about Ken Livingstone? A long time ago he did some good things, but I can't now remember what any of them were.

Fact is, the desperate desire to be cool has skewed our culture toward nihilism, carelessness, and ineptitude. It is now cool to be an idiot. A jackass. It's cool to be a failure, as long as your failure is the basis for a reality show.

Political interest [can] never be separated in the long run from moral right.

I guess we cut Michelle Obama's garden. You hear about that? The Democrats are distressed.

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

No amount of success - whatever that means, quote-unquote success - no amount of success replaces the reality of being separated from my family for this long.

For me, it doesn't matter whether it's a comedy, a Western or horror. As long as you've got a good story to tell, the genre almost doesn't matter. As an actor playing the role, it's all rooted in reality.

I didn't say I would cut off all communication with [Vladimir] Putin. What I said was as president of the United States, now is not the time to talk with him.

We've been proceeding so long on the plane of consciousness, we don't realize we are spiritual beings. Our minds, our senses, and the society around us all say, "Come on, you're getting into fantasy.

We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

We have to craft new political realities, not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, but here at home as well. Another world is possible.

Don't liken me to that [SOB]. Anybody that lets his public policies be mixed up with religious prejudice is a plain [GD] fool.

We are used to dealing with problems that have a solution and that can be solved in a finite period. But we're at the beginning of a long period of adjustment that does not have a clear-cut terminal point, and in which our wisdom and sophistication and understanding has to be one of the key elements.

I think Donald Trump is gonna do great. Because I've worked with him and known him a long time. He's a guy who is not programmed to fail.

The role of the scholar is to destroy chimeras, that of the statesman is to make use of them.

The political and substantive reality is that the agenda has to change. I don't think they have any choice.

We're in a political depression - a great political depression

I have long had a theory Bill Clinton-Hillary Clinton relationship. Not how they met, not that story, not the courtship or any of that. But how it happened that this once-in-a-lifetime woman.

Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop; to free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.

My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.

The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.

I'm not really much into politics, because it's rarely discussed in my line of work.

For too long, we've assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that's a very good thing.