Were Quotes

Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I've never played with a band. I've always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

If I were a painter, you'd be calling me Shaqcasso.

In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar - a practice which is still continued.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help... Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business - you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

We call our country home of the brave and land of the free, but it's not. We give a false portrayal of freedom. We're not free - if we were, we'd allow people their freedom.

I'd go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

The people I grew up around who I really liked were quick on the draw. It always just wowed me. And my mum would make weird funny comments. I can see in myself her self-deprecating, hippie humour. I can't take myself too seriously.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

I grew up listening to Queen. They were no stranger to throwing in the unexpected and something a little more dramatic.

A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

Even the people I surround myself with... are wiser, a little bit older than me, where before, all my boyfriends were younger.

I think you end up doing the stuff you were supposed to do at the time you were supposed to do it.

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot.

In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them.

I shopped for body shapers for the first time in my life and I was horrified. They were thick - it was like wearing workout clothes and they all had a leg band on one side that showed through the pants.

President Johnson and I have a lot in common. We were both born in small towns and we're both fortunate in the fact that we think we married above ourselves.

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

We campaigned on the fact that we were going to have to take difficult decisions because of the state of the public finances. When we got into government we discovered that actually the public finances were in an even worse state than we thought.

But here's the deal: If I were smart, I could figure out curling. If I were even smarter, I could figure out why people would actually watch other people doing it. I have tried. I can't. I can't even figure out the object of the game. Is it like darts? I just don't get it.

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

There were a few years there when I was just so enamored with the idea of living some sort of famous person's lifestyle that really isn't suited to me.