Quotes About Engagement

At one point in my life, I was very involved with social causes. I'm still involved, but now I have a family and it's important to me.

Mutual INTRIGUE is the key to turning frustrating, waste-of-time, one-way communications into productive, rewarding two-way connections.

Keep in mind that you're more interested in what you have to say than anyone else is. ANDY ROONEY

If they don't see or hear something in the first minute (or first page) that earns their favorable attention; It's NEXT and they're on to something else.

Fighting is a way to feel, an anti–video game, a way to force some-thing to happen. That's what brought me back to it, because when I've fought someone, I know something has happened. How many days of your life pass you by that you could take or leave? When nothing really happened?

This was the feeling I was after. My adrenal glands were triggered and I was fully engaged in the moment: Someone was trying to kill me. The door opened on a new world.

The less identifiable one person's effort is, the less effort they put in.

They are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute.

As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

Texts are not "processed" as much as they are resurrected, and the image of reader and information processor or computer device, which often dominates current discussions of reading, seems less apt than another metaphor: the reader as necromancer.

I will check the internet for at least an hour every morning scanning worldwide news to do with child abuse. So if you're constantly putting yourself in an environment where you're checking up on social economics or homelessness problems, if you keep yourself aware of it, you don't really have a day off.

We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.

Early on in my tenure, I was given a cartoon that circulated widely at the UN. The cartoon showed dozens of people listening to a speech. In the first panel, the speaker asks, "Who wants change?" and all audience members enthusiastically raise their hands. In the second panel, the speaker refines his question, asking, "Who wants to change?" This time, each audience member looks toward the ground, demurring.

We can't only try diplomacy after countries have done what we want.

Listen," he said firmly. "If you hear nothing else, hear this. You work at the White House. There is no other room where a bunch of really smart people of sound judgment are getting together and figuring out what to do. It will be the scariest moment of your life when you fully internalize this: There is no other meeting. You're in the meeting. You are the meeting. If you have a concern, raise it.

Without ever discussing it or making a conscious shift, we reflexively engaged one another in meetings. This did not mean we always agreed with one another; some of my most heartfelt arguments were with my fellow female Senior Directors. But we took one another's ideas seriously. This meant never leaving them simply hanging in the air, which typically happened in large group discussions.

I launched into my speech, it took me a few seconds to realize that the only one listening was max (the dog) but at least he had the good manners to stop chewing the toilet brush and pay attention.

We cannot make events. Our business is wisely to improve them.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

It takes two people to say a thing--a sayer and a sayee. The one is just as essential to any true saying as the other.

If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.

All I want is to be in the game.

You know, I've always wanted to ask one of these guys a question and really corner them and get them to answer a question for once instead of tap dancing around it. And unfortunately I asked the question, but I still got a tap dance. Almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.

The two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.