Were Quotes

Sometimes, I feel I am really blessed to be blind because I probably would not last a minute if I were able to see things.

My teenage years were exactly what they were supposed to be. Everybody has their own path. It's laid out for you. It's just up to you to walk it.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them, 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

I had several different bosses during the early years of 'Dilbert.' They were all pretty sure I was mocking someone else.

When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.

The most experience I had in the criminology field is playing a thug as an actor. That was my first paid job. The police academy at the college was paying people to reenact the calls that potential cops would get. So I got to play thugs and people who were unruly.

Our freedoms were born in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the musket fires of an historic revolution.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

There were a lot of people who were a little afraid of the rage or blaming stance I was taking, and find what I am doing now more refreshing.

The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.

We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.

My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that's where a lot of preachers' kids get off base sometimes. Because they don't see the same things at both places.

I don't think I even knew how big we were at the time. It was mad. I gained a lot through East 17 and I'm grateful for being able to have that experience.

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.

I watched a lot of TV, and it clicked one day that these people were acting. It sounded like the most fun thing ever.

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.

I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.

The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor. If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved.

American inventiveness and the desire to build developed because we were guaranteed the right to own our success.

If you were to offer a thirsty man all wisdom, you would not please him more than if you gave him a drink.

I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn't turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.