If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas
John CleeseRead
If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.
Interpretation
Taking decisive action is crucial when facing challenges.
This quote by John Cleese emphasizes the importance of commitment and focus when undertaking significant risks or challenges. At the moment of taking action, such as 'leaping a ravine', it's vital to concentrate on the task at hand rather than overthinking or reconsidering one's choices, as this can lead to doubt and failure.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage a team before a big game.
If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas
Because, as we all know, itβs easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And itβs also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that weβre not so sure about.
In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that's not the case. They're both.
I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.
When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.
Well, the only way I can get a leading-man role is if I write it.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete β that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
I condemn racism on all levels, whether personal or systemic.
I always felt that whatever I had to endure was nothing compared to what the average soldier, sailor or airman had to put up with.
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.
Every good citizen makes his country's honor his own, and cherishes it not only as precious but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defense and its conscious that he gains protection while he gives it.
To me, wrestling is therapy. No matter how bad my personal situation is, when I step into the ring, all my troubles disappear. My baggage stays in the back where it belongs.
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