In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.
Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.
Banks and credit agencies learn continuously about the purchases we make. This is convenient and diminishes the risk of theft. It also means that banks can know more about our lifestyle than our close relatives.
Something is mighty wrong with our priorities when professing Christian men joke about their wives, joke about their children, and joke about God, but fight to the death over their favorite sports team.
At a time when threats to the physical environment have never been greater, it may be tempting to believe that people need to be mounting the barricades rather than asking abstract questions about the human place in nature. Yet without confronting such questions, it will be hard to know which barricades to mount, and harder still to persuade large numbers of people to mount them with us. To protect the nature that is all around us, we must think long and hard about the nature we carry inside our heads.
One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.
What's cool about Twitter is that you can make a joke about something very of-the-moment or random that I wouldn't be able to joke about in stand-up.
I prefer to remain mysterious and have people MAKE their own judgment calls about me than to always have to EXPLAIN who I am and what I’m about.
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.
France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.
Hardly anyone today thinks about sex. We joke about it, dream about it, watch movies about it, listen to music about it, lust about it. But we don't ever really think about it.
I will make a joke about any of my family members, about me, about my wife, if I really thought that I'm doing it to be funny. If there's some darkness to it, or I think it's ill-willed or mean or not cool, then I won't do it.
In order to function and pay our bills and our taxes and feed our families and stuff, musicians have to make a living. It's not about being a millionaire. It's about being able to survive. When there are people constantly stealing from you, it's quite frustrating. It's a matter of changing the public's option about doing it.
Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about justice, peace, or war, everything, without excluding our rejections of Marxism, is impregnated with Marxism.
I'm straight and always have been. When our family gets together, we joke about it or throw our hands up in desperation because there is very little we can do. If we make a big fuss about correcting these rumors, it just creates more attention and turns the whole thing into a soap opera.
One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history and foreign customs. Not only about countries and cities, but about plants and animals. Not only about lichened rocks and curious markings on the bark of trees, but about stars and atoms. Not only about your friends but about that strange labyrinth we inhabit which we call ourselves. Then, if we do that, we will never suffer a moment's boredom.
As Iraqi forces gain experience and the political process advances, we will be able to decrease our troop level in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists. These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.