Quotes on Ifs

If you want to end terrorism, you have to stop being terrorists

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

The truth is, if anything, I'm probably addicted to laughter.

If the road to social transformation can be paved only by saints who never make mistakes, the road will NEVER be built.

If women are breadwinners and men bring home the bacon, why do people complain about having no dough? I'm confused. Also hungry.

But you are also the biggest threat of all ...You are a gay person I like. Your threat is that you make being gay seem non-threatening. It's almost as if your happiness does not take mine away.

If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.

If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.

If I had a bucket list, I'd say raising my four girls to be strong, good women would be No. 1.

Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.

Don't be different just for different's sake. If you see it differently, function that way. Follow your own muse, always.

You see the one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not a Native American. I'm not politically correct. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. And if you notice, I put American before my ethnicity. I'm not a hyphenated African-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American or Mexican-American.

What occurred to me on [‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’], and also with the passing of her mother, is that there's going to come a time when I'm not going to get to be with this person anymore. I'm not going to get to be with my children anymore. Or friends, people I love and respect. And so, if we have a flare-up, it evaporates now. I don't want to waste time being angry at someone I love.

We want our sound to go into the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken some little thing in their minds... 'Cause there are so many sleeping people.

If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he is wrong.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

If we remind ourselves of the fact that every fifth American today rightly points and perhaps also with a certain degree of pride to his German ancestry or her German ancestry, we can safely say that we, indeed, share common roots.

Above all it is important to point out that we can only maintain our prosperity in Europe if we belong to the most innovative regions in the world.