Were Quotes

The banks are not lending, at least from what I see. They were so wild and reckless back in the good times that they got burned terribly.

Both my parents are English and came out to Australia in 1967. I was born the following year. My parents, and immigrants like them, were known as '£10 poms.' Back then, the Australian government was trying to get educated British people and Canadians - to be honest, educated white people - to come and live in Australia.

There was one occasion when I was very young - eight years or seven years old - that Jewish businessmen went through the forest, and they were assassinated. And that was for the first time I saw in our paper where there were assassinations in our place.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more.

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

For me, Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.

Self-esteem comes from who you have in your life. How you were raised. What you struggled with as a child.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.

There's a lot about the character. It doesn't always happen, but there are some characters you really create a relationship with, almost as if they were your friend. And you never get into their heads again or think like them.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

In the seventies we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes. We had to make it okay for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.

God created the world; the laws of nature were created by God. True science tries to find out what God put in the world. The trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don't know what they're talking about because they weren't there. They can't speculate about the origins of life because they weren't there.

Don't wish it were easier, wish you were better.

Not only was it nearly impossible to hear because of these huge rubber ears we had to wear, but we also had these huge furry hands which were absolutely useless, especially if you had to scratch yourself.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.

It's that I wasn't suited to do the kind of comedy that these people were coming to hear - mainstream comedy.

I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.

If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.

My parents were just searching for an alternative way of raising their children.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

The Web forces me to be disciplined and not to waste time - but before the Web was invented, there were plenty of opportunities to do that anyway.

We were born to die and we die to live. As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.