Quotes on People

People need to be edited; life needs to be edited. I need to be edited.

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people - don't tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment it is the most vulnerable - one negative comment could knock you off course.

I think failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way, it is about answering to yourself.

Don't solicit feedback on your product, idea or your business just for validation purposes. You want to tell the people who can help move your idea forward, but if you're just looking to your friend, co-worker, husband or wife for validation, be careful. It can stop a lot of multimillion-dollar ideas in their tracks in the beginning.

It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

A lot of people ask me, 'How did you have the courage to walk up to record labels when you were 12 or 13 and jump right into the music industry?' It's because I knew I could never feel the kind of rejection that I felt in middle school. Because in the music industry, if they're gonna say no to you, at least they're gonna be polite about it.

I love it when people say things to me in public and want to meet me, because I want to meet them! Early on, my manager told me, 'If you want to sell 500,000 records, then go out there and meet 500,000 people.'

Most of my songs have names of people I've met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.

I never want to change so much that people can't recognize me.

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn't have to define you. It doesn't have to limit you.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

All of my favorite people - people I really trust - none of them were cool in their younger years.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

If we have any hope of finding ways for seven billion people to live well on planet with finite resources, we have to learn to use our resources efficiently. Plastic bags are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly.

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.

I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.

All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.