David Simon Quotes

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Athens is the birthplace of modern tragedy. In the Greek tragic plays, the tableau of the characters would become a statue, like the statue of Oedipus reaching up to the Gods with blood spilling out of his eyes. I love the way the Greeks would immortalize experience. Things that all of us feel.

All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.

Where art and business intersect is a challenging hurdle for a lot of people, reconciling the fact that not everyone is going to make it in the same way. Yeah, you have to be a little selfish, probably.

We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame upon something outside ourselves. We are always standing up to set right other people, and not ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is a devil's world." We curse others and say, "What infatuated fools!" But why should we be in such a world, if we really are so good? If this is a devil's world, we must be devils also; why else should we be here? "Oh, the people of the world are so selfish!" True enough; but why should we be found in that company, if we be better? Just think of that.

Themistocles being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, said, "Which would you rather be, a conqueror in the Olympic games, or the crier that proclaims who are conquerors?

Laurel and Hardy. That's John and Yoko, and we stand a better chance under that guise, because all the serious people, like Martin Luther King, and Kennedy, and Gandhi, got shot.

Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.

It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.

I have another question: Hillary Clinton, lying to the American people about her selfish, awful judgment in making our secrets vulnerable.Guilty or not guilty?

People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.

Elites are inevitable in politics. That is how politics is going to work. The question is, are your elites responsible, public-spirited? Do they think about the interests of others, not just themselves? And the story of Western politics since the beginning of the century is that as elites become more separated, more selfish, as they leave behind their populations and don't think about them, they become discredited. And the people look for alternatives. But the alternative is worse. Those rules of the game protect us all. And they are more precious than almost any political outcome.

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men too, when they, at their birth, have grey hair on their temples.

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.

I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn't matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there's nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I've got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am.

Faults are committed within the walls of Troy and also without. [There is fault on both sides.]

Nothing will make me change my principles. Even with the knife at my neck I shall still declare, up to this day, the poor have done everything; it is time for the rich to take their turn... The selfish people, the young idlers, must be made useful, whether they like it or not, and some respite be procured for the useful and respectable worker.

You don't make me feel like you used to. That's why I'm leaving That's why people leave each other They come to their senses and get selfish again.

Why do you think people cheat?," I asked. "Because they're bored? Because they can? Because they're selfish and think they're entitled to anything they want? Because they don't think they'll get caught?

Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

Zeus, the father of the Olympic Gods, turned mid-day into night, hiding the light of the dazzling Sun; and sore fear came upon men.

Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.