Quotes About Action

When I started, I was 18 and really into punk rock and just wanted the action. Over the years, I've gravitated towards the travel and experience around surfing and trying to relay that feeling. Going forward, I'm interested in story-driven and personality-driven themes.

The strongest governments on earth cannot clean up pollution by themselves. They must rely on each ordinary person, like you and me, on our choices, and on our will.

Things present themselves to you, and it's how you choose to deal with them that reveals who you are. We all say a lot of things, don't we, about who we are and how we think. But in the end it's your actions, how you respond to circumstance that reveals your character.

The gods help them that help themselves.

If a man is not to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to him, what is he to do, or what is he good for?

Opportunities present themselves every day - to everyone. You just have to be alert and ready to act.

When plays present themselves, I can't miss 'em. I got to make 'em.

What I hope is less about what the greens will do but what people who don't consider themselves part of the green movement will do.

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.

I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.

We need less theoretical debate and more practical application and acknowledgment of what Europe can and does do so that it is brought home to people in a relevant way.

There are no excuses for theoretical physicists not to perform and deliver.

I recognise that Socialism has ended its purely theoretical course, and that the hour to construct has come.

You can't be theoretical when you're building a musical.

I don't like to move abstract theoretical policies that, on a white paper, sound good. If I wanted to do that, I'd be a professor.

The problem with people who live in a world of speeches and books and theories is they don't know how to fix things in the real world when they go wrong. They feign ignorance, blame others, and make another eloquent speech.

Good intentions and grand theories do not make a good programme. Programmes work best when they're based on a detailed und­er­standing of the problem being solved and how they are implemented on the ground.

Here is an entirely banal idea that I think has the potential to change the world: Take evidence seriously. Taking evidence seriously does not mean privileging numbers over all other forms of knowledge - theories, narratives, images. Nor does it mean the kind of radical skepticism that questions everything to the point where no action is possible.

Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

If you take Darwinian theory, make a 'scientific' principle out of it, put it into political action, then you have something like Nazi Germany.

Therefore, let us not despair, but instead, survey the position, consider carefully the action we must take, and then address ourselves to our common task in a mood of sober resolution and quiet confidence, without haste and without pause.

Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling, and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfill the same purpose.

The enemy resembles us. Therefore, he needs to be approached not as an assembly of 'targets' to be destroyed one by one; but as a living, intelligent entity capable of acting and reacting.