“Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying… We’ve shopped till we dropped alright, face down on the floor.”

Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?

For a long time on Earth humans didn’t worship good gods; that’s a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.

Experimental science is fascinating, but I don’t want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I’ll read about it.

if you search the bible, you will find no reference to birth control or gay marriage, and you will not find a word, strangely, about stem cell research. I have searched.

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles…bot h of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.

But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

War cannot be used as a means to prevent or abolish wars. … The idea of a war to prevent war is one of its oldest, and cruelest, tricks.

When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where … the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.

Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of ‘traditional values’ installed. … the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.

Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.

To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”

Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids — without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.

I’ve never pursued a role. I always hear stories about actors going after parts and I’m, like, ‘How do they do that?’ It seems so weird. It seems like a total myth or something.

Id have to fight for an Australian role over an American actor, and I already have to do that overseas, so why would I have to do it back at home?

Give role players love. Praise can be most valuable when it’s merited by someone whose supporting role is often overlooked

The moment you say, ‘I want to do a role,’ the story suffers. I don’t set priorities in terms of roles or scripts.

There is a great amount of precision within each individual’s technique and role in the play. When you put 22 of them out there, it can look chaotic but when you break down individual performance, it looks less so.

I have always felt my role as a designer is to do the very best I can for a woman to make her look her best. Fashion is only fashion once a woman puts it on.

I usually go with roles that I find entertaining. But every once in a while, there comes along a film that has an important social message. As actors, we have a certain responsibility toward our audience.

Whatever role we were in our family of birth, we take on this persona and in your 20s and 30s in particular, you end up thinking that’s you and that isn’t necessarily you.