Californians want to have clean air, clean water - not like the Trump Administration is trying to do with its rollback of environmental regulations, like the reversal of the Clean Power Plan.
One of the first rules of playing the power game is that all bad news must be accepted calmly, as if one already knew and didn't care.
Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.
Calmness is the cradle of power.
That really important freedom in my life, the freedom to marry, came about because of choices that were made by policymakers who had power over me and millions of others.
Once all the power goes out, there will still be human beings standing together around a campfire, playing acoustic guitars.
I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people.
I went to Afghanistan in '96 to write about terrorist training camps south of Jalalabad and Tora Bora, in the mountains. I was there right before the Taliban took over, literally a few weeks before they took Kabul. The frontline wasn't terribly active, but it was definitely there. And they swept into power.
Never give up, which is the lesson I learned from boxing. As soon as you learn to never give up, you have to learn the power and wisdom of unconditional surrender, and that one doesn't cancel out the other; they just exist as contradictions. The wisdom of it comes as you get older.
Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback, and the iterative process - reworking, reworking, and reworking again until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.
I lived by the candlelight for two years because I couldn't afford power. It was nice and romantic at the time, but if you can't afford power you're pretty broke. You endure it.
In the week following Sandy, we weren't flooded, but we were without everything else - I ended up living by candlelight - no phones, no computers, no light, no power. If we took a walk at night to go and find something to eat, it was completely black, with no lights coming out of the windows, no street lights: a very apocalyptic feeling.
Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.
Entire generations of Americans have come of age since the ancient time when the president's power was constrained by a duty of candor to the American people.
All things by immortal power. Near of far, to each other linked are, that thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.
America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.
I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
If someone were to say that life at hard labor is as painful as death and therefore equally cruel, I should reply that, taking all the unhappy moments of perpetual slavery together, it is perhaps even more painful, but these moments are spread out over a lifetime, and capital punishment exercises all its power in an instant.
To develop political and economic power in a capitalist society, you need capital.
The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers.
