#ape

Quite a few musicians came to our house. And my ma took me to hear many more, hoping to encourage in me a love of music. But she wouldn't consent to my having music lessons, for she feared I might end up as she had done - unable to play except from paper. ↗

— Mary Lou Williams

#consent #done #encourage #end #except

I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape. ↗

— James Q. Wilson

#extricate #i #red #red tape #system

Apparently 'The Office' plays in Brazil. Who would've thought that Brazilians would identify with a bunch of pasty white Scrantonians in a paper company? But the Brazilians I've met have really loved the show. ↗

— Rainn Wilson

#brazil #brazilians #bunch #company #i

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#forgiveness #immorality #redemption #religion #responsibility

Nixon's grand mistake was his failure to understand that Americans are forgiving, and if he had admitted error early and apologized to the country, he would have escaped. ↗

— Bob Woodward

#apologized #country #early #error #escaped

I'd learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw - shapes of characters and things. ↗

— Steve Wozniak

#characters #draw #drive #electronics #enough

I went to Washington to ask for a little residual payment for the people who had written films in the early, early days, people who never got any residuals on tapes or anything at all. ↗

— Fay Wray

#anything #ask #days #early #films

Every medium has its advantages and weaknesses and there are many things I can put down on paper that I might not be able to put into film or into a stage performance. In each form, one can communicate powerfully in different ways. ↗

— Lawrence Wright

#advantages #communicate #different #different ways #down

As a kid I quite fancied the romantic, Bohemian idea of being an artist. I expect I thought I could escape from the difficulties of maths and spelling. Maybe I thought I would avoid the judgement of the establishment. ↗

— Peter Wright

#avoid #being #bohemian #could #difficulties

What kind of morons do you have working at newspapers in Austin that would base an entire review of an artist's performance on whether or not they had a good seat? ↗

— Al Yankovic

#austin #base #entire #good #had