The Bible has been through millions of rounds of exegesis and interpretation, but it hasn't been until quite recently that it's been taken as the absolute truth, to the point where people expect it to inform ideas about biology and life on this planet.
The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh.
It's terribly important that you can criticise people's ideas without criticising them, and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth.
What being a socialist means is... that you hold out... a vision of society where poverty is absolutely unnecessary, where international relations are not based on greed... but on cooperation... where human beings can own the means of production and work together rather than having to work as semi-slaves to other people who can hire and fire.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
It's absolutely wrong that I don't want guys to challenge me. And the people who say that aren't in the room.
There's a television show, 'Hoarders,' where people have those homes filled with stuff. Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.
You've got to trust people. And because I am a control freak, sometimes that's difficult for me, because I want to micro-manage absolutely everything. I can't hand over. But I'm trying to do that more.
People are absolutely free to criticize the government and protest, but their protests should be in such a way as to improve the situation in the country and their life.
People ask my mother whether she had any idea that I'd be CEO of a company some day, and she would say, 'Absolutely not. Totally out of the realm of possibility.' There was certainly nothing that would have been very predictable in my upbringing.
I have to struggle to change people's perceptions of me. I grew very frustrated with the perception that I'm this shy, retiring, inhibited aristocratic creature when I'm absolutely not like that at all. I think I'm much more outgoing and exuberant than my image.
Mostly, I think of myself as having great common sense. I've always been proud of that. Was I a terrific student? Absolutely not. But put me in a roomful of people, and I don't think I'm ever going to embarrass myself.
The thing about 'Watchmen' that people should know is that when it came out there was absolutely nothing like it. Up until then, comics were about the same thing: a guy in tights fighting another guy in tights and saving the girl - that was it.
People don't realise how difficult it is to work with people day in and day out that know absolutely nothing.
I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.
There are no absolutes in this world, and there will always be mistakes that are made within brokerage firms; there will always be people who set out to deceive the regulators and even deceive their own senior management.
Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that?
The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction. It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive ID and they do whatever they want.
I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
