Quotes About Perspective

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

Whenever I'm on my way to a premiere or something, I always have a good laugh in the car... because it's all so absurd - I'm one generation removed from starvation.

We have food all around us all the time, and if we haven't eaten for three hours, we think we're starving. You're not starving - human beings can go for 30 days without food.

But I have been in some very beautiful churches, then I've looked outside and seen people starving to death.

You can't argue that you have to have art, and prove it to anybody. Why should I give $1,000 to art when there are people starving? Of course, that's true. But just because you can't, theoretically, defend the arts, or make a sensible argument for their preservation, doesn't mean they're not important.

I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews - so I'm in favour of starving him.

It's one thing to see the suffering and dying on the television screen and quite another to be there and experience it. You cannot look into the eyes of a starving child and yourself remain the same.

In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader was starving. He's the fattest guy - how can anyone believe that?

The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.

I honestly don't know what criteria makes someone right-wing or left-wing anymore. The boundaries of those definitions seem to be in a state of flux. I'm not socialist, I know that.

It can feel like such a hectic lifestyle. We are always busy and always under pressure. So giving myself that 10 minutes of meditation each day has really helped me to relax, restore some perspective, and gain that meditative state.

I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.

He's more of a slob than you? Instead of condemning, state your standards: 'I need to live in a place that's clean. I respect that it's not a big deal to you, but it's important to me to enjoy my home.' This removes ego.

Government shutdowns are so stupid. From my perspective, somebody who's been in government, been in the military, worked with federal government workers in the State Department, in USAID and in the Department of Defense - you're hurting them.

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others have stated that they think AI is an existential risk. I disagree. I don't see a risk to humanity of a 'Terminator' scenario or anything of the sort.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

People have a preconceived notion about who I am and it's interesting. It's like picking who you want to win for the Oscars and not seeing the movie. Before you make a statement about someone, get all the information and see everything before you make a judgment.

Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.

I bill myself as a naturalist because if you say you're a naturalist, it gives people a conversation point to talk about what you actually do believe in, instead of when you say you're an atheist, and it's really just a statement of what you don't believe in.

With no more than six levels of misquotation, any statement can be made to say whatever you wish.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

A movie is really provocation. It's not a message, it's not a statement.

People lead complicated lives and aren't hanging on your every word or the company mission statement. You have to become a broken record of your expectations of the organization and show people why it is relevant and how it works in specific ways.

There is one particular argument that I call our 'ancient war.' If it could be summed up in one phrase, it would be, 'You don't get it. You don't understand what it's like to be me living with you.' There is such truth in that statement. None of us can really appreciate what it is like to be the other person, what that point of view feels like.