Quotes from "famous" people
---------------------------

"Nobody cares what you think. Once a creation has been put into the
world, you have only one responsibility to its creator: be
supportive. Support is not about showing how clever you are, how
observant of some flaw, how incisive in your criticism. There are
other people whose job it is to guide the creation, to make it work,
to make it live; either they did their job or they didn't. But that is
not your problem.

If you come to my show and you see me afterwards, say only this: "I
loved it." It doesn't matter if that's what you really felt. What I
need at that moment is to know that you care enough about me and the
work I do to tell me that you loved it, not "in spite of its flaws",
not "even though everyone else seems to have a problem with it," but
simply, plainly, "I loved it." If you can't say that, don't come
backstage, don't find me in the lobby, dont lean over the pit to see
me. Just go home, and either write me a nice email or don't. Say all
the catty, bitchy things you want to your friend, your neighbor, the
Internet.

Maybe next week, maybe next year, maybe someday down the line, I'll be
ready to hear what you have to say, but that moment, that face-to-face
moment after I have unveiled some part of my soul, however small, to
you; that is the most vulnerable moment in any artist's life. If I beg
you, plead with you to tell me what you really thought, what you
actually, honestly, totally believed, then you must tell me, "I loved
it." That moment must be respected."

--Stephen Sondheim on criticism, paraphrased by Jason Robert Brown

There are so many different kinds of famine in this world.  In my
country there is a famine of the body.  In this country there is
a famine of the spirit.  Stay here, and feed your people.

--Mother Teresa

Being an artist means not numbering and counting, but ripening like a
tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the
storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come.  It
does come.

Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions
toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is
clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts
in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself anyway it can and
is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against
all opposition.  We know little but that we must trust in what is
difficult: that something is difficult must be one more reason for us
to do it.

--Rainier Marie Rilke


Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's
inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
  --Reinhold Niebuhr

 It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere
 but to those who have a right to them.
    --Lady Croom, Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard

"We do it because it needs to be done.  Because if we don't,
no one else will.  And we do it even if no one knows what
we've done.  Even if no one knows we exist.  Even if no one
remembers we *ever* existed."
 
-Kara, Christmas with the Superheroes #2

  The message behind all of this, of course, is that reading is good for
  you. No.  Exercise and a proper diet are good for you. Reading isn't
  necessarily good for you at all, not in the uplifting civic ways this
  project intends. Parents used to complain about children reading too
  much the way they complain about children doing whatever it is they do
  too much of these days. The reasons are obvious. Reading -- passionate
  reading -- is secretive, profoundly private. The experience tramples
  you and exalts you at the same time. It makes you insurrectionary, if
  only in imagination, and it leads you quickly into worlds that never
  pretend to represent the representative views of ad hoc citywide
  reading-week committees.
     --Verlyn Klinkenborg, NYT editorial

"...Fortunately for us, with great power comes no appreciable increase in
 intelligence." 
	--Damage Control

Not some church, and not the state,
Not some dark capricious fate.
Who you are, and when you lose,
Comes only from the things you choose.
  	-- Robert C. White Jr.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
	-- William Henley, "Invictus"

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not
spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way
of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is
humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
	-- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the
courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of
the people I had to kill because they pissed me off. =)


``We interrupt our regular programming for a special report from the
politically correct census bureau whose latest analysis of the
population concludes that EVERYONE is equally a victim of something
today.  This means that blame is out and personal responsibility is
in!  The P.C. age is now officially over and a new era of common sense
has begun!  Independence of thought, opinions and speech is the rule
of the day!  Now when someone says something you don't like, 
TOUGH...deal with it!  It's time to wake up!!''
``...then, unfortunately, that's when I always wake up, doctor.''

``*sniff*  It's such a lovely dream...tell it to me again.''
	-- Non Sequitor

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.  Attack ships on fire
off the shoulder of Orion.  I've watched C-Beams glitter in the dark
near the Tannhauser Gate.  All those moments will be lost, like
tears in the rain.  Time to die"
	-- Roy Batty, Blade Runner