After my father had seen me in five or six things, he said, Son, your mother and I really enjoyed your recent film, and I must say that you're a lot like John Wayne. And I said, How so? And he said, Well, you're exactly the same in all your roles. Now, as a modern American actor, that's not what you want to hear. But for a guy who watched John Wayne movies and grew up in Iowa, it's a sterling compliment.
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Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred --it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the greatest assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the dropsy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust --the finer and more ethereal part mounts with winged spirit to watch over our latest memory, and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness.
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In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until it’s too late.
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The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.
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Propriety was a rigid master, but one that must be obeyed if one wanted to keep a sterling reputation.
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Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.
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The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.
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I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.
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Pain has its own noble joy, when it starts a strong consciousness of life, from a stagnant one.
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You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.
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It's very serious simply because you never know what type of gun it is, if it's loaded and what else is going on in the child's life that may precipitate something very bad from happening.
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