Quotes About Action

One, don't wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it's going?

Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive.

The movie teaches us how action is the enemy of suspense—how action releases tension instead of building it. Better to wait for a whole movie for something to happen (assuming we really care whether it happens) than to sit through a film where things we don't care about are happening constantly.

Robin Hood is a high-tech and well-made violent action picture using the name of Robin Hood for no better reason than that it's an established brand not protected by copyright

To think creatively, to struggle with an opaque text or confounding idea, to seek connections between periods of history or disciplines of thought, and to search for the precise word or the right rhythm for a single sentence—these are human actions every bit as worthy as the wielding of a hammer, the manipulation of a surgical scalpel, or the making of a courtroom argument.

There is even a view, not uncommonly expressed, that might best be regarded as a combination of A and D (or perhaps B and D)-a possibility that will actually feature significantly in our later deliberations. According to this view, the brain's action is indeed that of a computer, but it is a computer of such wonderful complexity that its imitation is beyond the wit of man and science, being necessarily a divine creation of God-the 'best programmer in the business'!

Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

When the judge asks me why I put poison in my wife's tea, he will not be satisfied by my saying 'Because electrical impulses from my brain caused my hand to reach for the bottle of arsenic and tip it into the waiting teacup'...

To modern man,' Hayek argues, 'the belief that all law governing human action is the product of legislation appears so obvious that the contention that law is older than law-making has almost the character of a paradox. Yet there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he could make or alter it.

Habits of secrecy, made necessary by the actual relations between states, violate the 'transcendental formula of public right', which is that an action is wrong if it is not compatible with being made public (PP, R. 126).

Either you let your life slip away by not doing the things you want to do, or you get up and do them.

I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking — by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.

Wishes, wishes. Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true

It would be an act of wisdom to depart immediately… but wisdom is itself the product of knowledge; and knowledge, unfortunately, is generally the product of foolish doings. So, to add to my own knowledge and to enhance my wisdom I shall remain another day, to see what occurs.

Wishes, wishes, I told him, Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true.

I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking—by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.

But it is written that it is better to burn one city than to curse the darkness.

What should I do?' Coyote yelled. 'Cultivate philosophy and run like hell,' said Bear...

Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he had done, or hadn't.

Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true.

I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking—by

Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers. It fell to the ground and did not return again. To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

Willful waste makes woeful want.