I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.
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More than 20 years ago, President Kennedy defined an approach that is as valid today as when he announced it. So let us not be blind to our differences,'' he said, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved.''Well, those differences are differences in governmental structure and philosophy. The common interests have to do with the things of everyday life for people everywhere. Just suppose with me for a moment that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, oh, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm with a Jim and Sally, and there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted. Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments? Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living?Before they parted company, they would probably have touched on ambitions and hobbies and what they wanted for their children and problems of making ends meet. And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would be saying to Ivan, Wasn't she nice? She also teaches music.'' Or Jim would be telling Sally what Ivan did or didn't like about his boss. They might even have decided they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon. Above all, they would have proven that people don't make wars.People want to raise their children in a world without fear and without war. They want to have some of the good things over and above bare subsistence that make life worth living. They want to work at some craft, trade, or profession that gives them satisfaction and a sense of worth. Their common interests cross all borders.
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Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.
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In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.
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True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to to sic alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.
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I think it was Laurence Olivier who said that one of the things you have to accept in art is that when you put your heart into doing something there will be people who don't like it for really good reasons, really smart people who don't like what you've done for very valid reasons. That is hard to accept, that there are really valid reasons for not liking anything. The astonishing thing is that there haven't been many valid reasons for anyone not to like this movie.
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Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.
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Avon invented the concept of direct marketing and direct selling beauty. And that's still very valid to us. We'll have a firm that will be around for another 114 years as strongly as it was the first 114.
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A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
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While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual, and the sublime are today suspect, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.
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Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical, sentimental irresponsiblity and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.
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You're bringing in a new segment into the market that was never there. A lot of investor money is pouring into gold and commodities. It's become a valid asset class.
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Your good article about causing serious questions when medical results on men studies are applied to women, opened my eyes: If men and women are so different, how in the world can scientists reach any valid conclusions from the myriad projects and experiments... on different species??? It makes all the animal testing/experimentation pretty futile!
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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Man becomes fit and functionally valid only when, along with scholarship and expert skills, he has imbibed these values.
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More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
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Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
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The use and threat of force, when world peace is not in danger, are no longer valid frames of reference for achieving the ends sought today by sovereign nations.
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A healthy and fully functioning society must allocate its resources among a variety of competing interests, all of which are more or less valid but none of which should take precedence over national security.
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Information from one animal species cannot be taken as valid for any other. It is not a matter of balancing the cruelty of suffering animals against the gain of humanity spared from suffering, because that is not the choice. Animals die to enable hundreds of new drugs to be marketed annually, but the gain is to industry, not to mankind.'-
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The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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If merely feeling good could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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Kids' views are often just as valid as the teachers'. The best teachers are the ones that know that.
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If you feel you have a film that's valid, you stick your ass on the line.
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