Quotes on People

[In a republic,] it is not the people themselves who make the decisions, but the people they themselves choose to stand in their places.

Many people assume the diseases that kill us are pre-programmed into our genes. High blood pressure by 55, heart attacks at 60, maybe cancer at 70, and so on... But for most of the leading causes of death, our genes usually account for only 10-20 per cent of risk.

I am running to make history, to show that no human is limited. It's not about money, it's about showing a generation of people that there are no limits.

Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they're just like us... And when you see that they're just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.

Let me tell you a story about when I was growing up in Spain. Many Sundays, we would invite 30, 40, 50 people to the countryside, and my father would make a big paella. He put me in charge of the fire and the 'stove' - the rocks that hold the pan. But he wouldn't let me cook. I got so unbelievably upset.

It was only until I started to be myself that the music started to flow and people started to listen. So, thank you guys...

Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people.

Successful people will always tell you you can do something. It's the people who have never accomplished anything who will always discourage you from trying to achieve excellent things.

The hardest thing that I had to do every day as a working single parent was child care, to have to leave my child with people that I did not know and hope everything was OK, that was the most painful part of every day.

A lot of young people don't have a lot of faith in politicians. You can't depend on what they say. They talk in circles. They don't speak the kind of language that has truth to them. I'm speaking differently.

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

There would be no difficulty in securing the rights of the people and the liberties of Texas if men would march to their duty and not fly like recreants from danger. Texas must be defended and liberty maintained.

But I really believe that if you have the ability, there is an obligation to make people laugh

I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.

To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world. Black people. And I mean that in every sense.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.

...Wizard's Fifth Rule: Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie.

I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do.

How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.

People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.