God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest.
If we are more affected by the ruin of a palace than by the conflagration of a cottage, our humanity must have formed a very erroneous estimate of the miseries of human life.
I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident and removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long.
In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.
[Whole] generations may be swept away by the madness of kings in the space of a single hour.
I would say a magical thing happened on when the big 40th birthday came. I felt like a light kind of just went off, and maybe that's because I felt like at 40 I had the right to say and be who I wanted to be, say what I wanted to say, and accept what I didn't want to accept.
I always tell people that if you gave me a pen and a piece of paper when I was a teenager and said, "Write out how you'd like your career to go," I would have probably short changed myself compared to what it's been for real. I'm just extremely excited about what I've accomplished.
The ABCs of Death offers us a chance to work closely with a large number of visionary filmmakers to create a film with more jaw-dropping moments than a whole summer of blockbusters.
Reporters. . . most were carrion who fed on human tragedy.