Quotes on People

Many of the prophets of Jesus's time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time.

I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.

Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it

But, by just being myself, I end up touching a lot more people who might never have paid much attention to a female rapper.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances.

She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.

If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. … We’re going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if you’ve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars.

Every time I've failed, people had me out for the count, but I always come back.

Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.

People think retiring is fun. Well, maybe, but if you have a certain kind of fire inside, there is no end in sight.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

She felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary--you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.

You're worth something because God says you're worth something-not because of what people think or say about you.