Quotes on People

Fine words are traded. Noble deeds gain respect. But people who are not good, why abandon them?

There's a popular image of people who don't save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so hard has less to do with self-control and more to do with a scarcity of attention.

You get older, and people start passing away. And so if you're lucky - my mom died very young, for instance, and I have friends who died very young - but the point being that, I think if you're awake, you know you're going to pass on. And that the real treasure in life is the long term - relationships that you really value.

I want to bring clean water to people who do not have it. What I'm trying to do now is think of ways to build a well-drilling machine that is low-cost so people in rural areas can afford it.

I've been in this struggle for many years now. I understand racism. I understand that there are a lot of people in this country who don't care about the problems of the inner city. We have to fight every day that we get up for every little thing that we get. And so I keep struggling.

Most people spend their entire lives on a fantasy island called 'Someday I'll.'

If I hear about a tsunami that hit Asia, hundreds of people have lost their lives, and you see it and you hear about it, but you still brush your teeth, still have to go on with your day. But let you get information about one person who you're close to or you're intimate with, it has an almost paralyzing effect.

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

I trained in internal medicine, and I expected most of my time would be spent on diabetes or heart disease or cancer. What I didn't expect was that so many people I saw would be struggling with loneliness.

One of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today is that people talk too much and think too little. They act impulsively without thinking. I always try to think before I talk.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

People have to understand that unless social enterprise is experimental, it will not succeed in making a difference.

All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.

Many people feel "guilty" about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.

I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?' I decided I am going to live - or at least try to live - the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.

You see, you closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too--even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

I'd like to think I could have and should have won more, but that's not the point. And I was at the point where I was playing great tennis in the mid 80s - the type of tennis people hadn't seen before - and I was very proud of that.

Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.