#nit

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. ↗

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

#event #fraction #me #photography #recognition

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to Firing Line when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#cable-television #cable-television-in-the-us #conservatism #conservatism-in-the-us #gore-vidal

Abortion on demand, throughout the full nine months of a pregnancy, for virtually any reason, became public policy in the United States of America. No other developed democracy had, or has, such a permissive abortion regime. ↗

— Robert Casey

#america #any #became #demand #democracy

God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered. ↗

— John Cleese

#father #flattered #god #know #like

Where's your church?" "We're standing in it." "But this is a bookstore and it's a Friday." "Yes, but you might also choose to see it as a cathedral of the human spirit-a storehouse consecrated to the full spectrum of human experience. Just about every idea we've ever had is in here somewhere. A place containing great thinking is a sacred space. ↗

— Forrest Church

#book-lover #books #bookstore #faith #hope

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious. ↗

— Fidel Castro

#crisis #driving #each #either #idea

North Americans don't understand... that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity. ↗

— Fidel Castro

#country #cuba #humanity #just #north

Opportunity today, prosperity tomorrow. ↗

— Julian Castro

#prosperity #today #tomorrow

There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman. ↗

— Carrie Chapman Catt

#american woman #country #does #equal #intelligence

I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it's science fiction, horror or really anything. I'm just drawn to quality. I don't think 'Darkness Falls' is horror; there isn't any gore by any stretch of the imagination. ↗

— Emma Caulfield

#anything #darkness #definitely #drawn #falls