“My feeling is that in the purest form, an actor is a service to the people. It's democratic in its purest form. That's what an actor is. If he or she isn't that, then there is no purpose in doing it. They're like priests.”
Quote collection
People Quotes — page 906 of 5018
“To me good storytelling is about journeys. It's about people's journeys, people's discoveries and how they deal with those discoveries; circumstances that put people in different situations.”
“I guess I'm interested in people and society and what we do collectively in the realm of decisions that shape our world. You know, at least on a human level.”
“Whether you're with a group of people, whether you're playing music or whether you're by yourself, even if it's written material, you have to be listening.”
“If I can learn a couple of phrases in Italian but do mostly weird, absurd music things, people will like it.”
“We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.”
“Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.”
“The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes ... No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes.”
“Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.”
“A well-worn adage advises those who set out upon a great enterprise to count the cost, yet some of the greatest enterprises have succeeded because the people who undertook them did not count the cost.”
“People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching.”
“I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust, by and by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers, both moral and intellectual; and you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.”
“What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.”
“And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.”
“Only a scientific people can survive in a scientific future.”
“People never will recollect that mere learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.”
“No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical”
“Cherish [Science], venerate her, follow her methods faithfully ... and the future of this people will be greater than the past.”
“There is far too much of the feeding-bottle in education and young people ought to be supplied with good intellectual food and then left to help themselves.”
“Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things plain to uninstructed people, was one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners in one's own mind.”