Ambition & Fame
Page 10
- Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything—it can stop the Vietnam War. It can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.
- In the 2012 election, Obamacare, as it's called, and I'll be more polite - the ACA …was a major issue in the campaign. I campaigned all over America for two months, everywhere I could. And in every single campaign rally I said, 'We have to repeal and replace Obamacare.' Well, the people spoke. They spoke, much to my dismay, but they spoke. And they reelected the President of the United States.
- But let's remember the reasons the Iranians say they're here now is that that economy is suffering desperately under the weight of sanctions. They want relief from the sanctions. My concern is they're going to want relief from the sanctions before they do anything to deserve it.
- There was a point that I stopped crying. It’s not just because I didn’t feel pain anymore, not because I didn’t feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.
- The fact that the senators aren’t here and Harry Reid is off somewhere is all the evidence that you need to know that they want to shut down the government. I personally believe that Sen. Reid and the president — for political purposes — want to shut down the government.
- I don't envy the marketing team handling 'Don Jon.' It can't be easy to sell a film that uses porn (LOTS AND LOTS OF PORN) as a metaphor, no matter how good it is (and 'Don Jon' is very good).
- I can't concern myself with how viewers feel.
- America is just so weird in what they think is right and wrong. Like, I was watching ‘Breaking Bad’ the other day, and they were cooking meth. I could literally cook meth because of that show. It's a how-to. And then they bleeped out the word 'f__k'. And I'm like, really? They killed a guy, and disintegrated his body in acid, but you're not allowed to say 'f__k'? It's like when they bleeped 'molly' at the VMAs. Look what I'm doing up here right now, and you're going to bleep out 'molly'?
- But the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk. Nor are the lacteal veins of the law supplied with milk from a source outside the society. Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one class unless another citizen or other classes have been forced to send it in. If every person draws from the treasury the amount that he has put in, it is true, then, that the law plunders nobody. But this procedure does nothing for the persons who have no money. It does not promote equality of income. The law can be an instrument of equalization only when it takes from some persons and gives to others, other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.
- Tactics and strategies ought to be based on what the real world is, and we do not have the political power to do this. We're not about to shut the government down over the fact that we cannot, only controlling one house of Congress, tell the president that we’re not going to fund any portion of [Obamacare]. Because we can’t do that.
- If Assad is eating Cheerios, we're going to take away his spoon and give him a fork. Will that degrade his ability to eat Cheerios? Yes. Will it deter him? Maybe. But he'll still be able to eat Cheerios.
- I’ll tell you…why Wonder Woman worked. Or Bionic Woman. Or any of those [shows] really. It was because it wasn’t about brawn…it was about brains. And yes, she happened to be beautiful, she happened to be kind of extraordinary in some way, but she wasn’t a guy. And I think that, [now], they…put out a female hero, and all they are doing is changing the costume from a man to a woman…they’re not showcasing any of the tremendous dichotomies than women possess in term of softness and toughness, sweetness and grit, inner and outer strength.