You don't really stay attached to things. Life goes on, so you don't really sit around and think about how they are relevant to other people. You hope that whatever you create will be [relevant].
I don't require myself or anyone to go beyond what they feel they can do. I just do suggest - for their own eventual happiness - that they go as far as they can. They can usually go much further than they think.
When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.
It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which [I] lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the 'merely personal,' from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.
There are times where I'd say the Oval Office, you use to gather the facts. The decisions you probably make late at night, or at least I do. But there are some times where you think you've made a decision, but during that walk, where you're announcing the decision, you've just got to make sure that, you're prepared to live with it, because as you know George, a lot of these decisions are not - the outcomes are uncertain.
I understand how democracy works. Quite a little bit of criticism in it, which is fine. That's fine. That's part of the process. But I have every right, as do my administration, to make it clear what the consequences would be of policy. And if we think somebody is strong or doesn't see the world the way it is, we'll continue to point that out to people.
Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
I know that people have their own opinions and they look at what the norm is for people. I look at age as just being a number. In my mind my age is still 28 and I think I have to remember how old I am.
Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play.
I think, not only Al Qaida have an ideology; they have tactics necessary to spread their ideology. And it would be a huge mistake for the United States to leave the region, to concede territory to the terrorists, to not confront them.
In a perfect world, there would be no censorship, because there would be no judgement. I find the hypocritical aspect disconcerting, to say the least. We can show people being murdered on television, but I'm not able to say "chickenshit" in public. At the same time, I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.
I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage? . . . Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something's wrong.