Ralph Richardson Quotes
British - Actor December 19, 1902 - October 10, 1983

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
Ralph Richardson

In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.
Ralph Richardson

The most precious things in speech are pauses.
Ralph Richardson

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.
Ralph Richardson

You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator.
Ralph Richardson


Jean Genet Quotes
French - Dramatist December 19, 1910 - April 15, 1986

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
Jean Genet

I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
Jean Genet

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Jean Genet

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.
Jean Genet

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
Jean Genet

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.
Jean Genet

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.
Jean Genet

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
Jean Genet

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
Jean Genet

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
Jean Genet

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
Jean Genet

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
Jean Genet


Edith Piaf Quotes
French - Musician December 19, 1915 - October 11, 1963

Singing is a way of escaping. It's another world. I'm no longer on earth.
Edith Piaf

Don't care what people say. Don't give a damn about their laws.
Edith Piaf

I want to make people cry even when they don't understand my words.
Edith Piaf

As far as I'm concerned, love means fighting, big fat lies, and a couple of slaps across the face.
Edith Piaf

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.
Edith Piaf

Tell me what you'd like to hear me sing. I'll sing whatever you like, after which I'll take up a collection, if you don't mind.
Edith Piaf

I think you have to pay for love with bitter tears.
Edith Piaf

All I've done all my life is disobey.
Edith Piaf

Death is the beginning of something.
Edith Piaf

I'd like to see one person - just one - who would own up to having been a coward.
Edith Piaf

I don't want to die an old lady.
Edith Piaf

I wouldn't mind at all coming back to earth after my death.
Edith Piaf

If God has allowed me to earn so much money, it is because He knows I give it all away.
Edith Piaf

People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.
Edith Piaf

Death does not exist.
Edith Piaf

I've been thinking about Jesus. Don't you find it a bit strange that, since He was living with His family and all, He up and left them just when they needed him most?
Edith Piaf

Money? How did I lose it? I never did lose it. I just never knew where it went.
Edith Piaf

To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing.
Edith Piaf

To sing is to bring to life; impossible if the words are mediocre, however good the music.
Edith Piaf


Derrick Jensen Quotes
American - Author Born: December 19, 1960

People say 'what do you mean' when you talk about 'bringing down civilization.' What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That's what I really mean.
Derrick Jensen

I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.
Derrick Jensen

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.
Derrick Jensen

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.
Derrick Jensen

Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.
Derrick Jensen

Civilization can never be sustainable.
Derrick Jensen

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.
Derrick Jensen

Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.
Derrick Jensen

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.
Derrick Jensen

My audience consists mainly of people who already recognize how bad this culture is, and I want to push them to become more radical. It doesn't really matter to me if they are Left or Right.
Derrick Jensen

I get asked quite often if I'm an anarchist. If they want to put a label on me, that's fine. What is most important to me is to live in a world that is not being murdered.
Derrick Jensen

Part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it, and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
Derrick Jensen

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.
Derrick Jensen

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.
Derrick Jensen

In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.
Derrick Jensen

If you see yourself as entitled to a resource, and if you're not willing or incapable of seeing this other as a being with whom you can and should be in relation with, then you're going to take the resource.
Derrick Jensen

My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl - in other words, only four human generations ago - there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home.
Derrick Jensen