A Quote by James Purnell

It seems absolutely wrong that people should be able to profit in this cynical way from an event that is designed to highlight the need for action on poverty in Africa, and for which so many artists and others are donating their valuable time for nothing [on people selling Live8 concert tickets on eBay]
We don't necessarily need so many artists. I recommend that many of the people who think they want to be artists should go into the American Friends Service Committee, or do government outreach to communities that don't have water, or that need seeds or ecological assistance. It would create a system in which people with engaged sensibilities and potential insight assist instead of imposing. I think it could leap right out of the art world into wonderful community action.
I know many Europeans and I think many of them don't even believe me when I say that people in US don't have vacations. Obviously a lot of people do but there are many, tens of millions of people that don't and there's certainly no guarantee of a vacation. So paid time off is very valuable where people know they could get four or five weeks vacation, which is absolutely standard in Europe. Denmark has 6 weeks. So I think that's something that's very valuable, giving people time off.
In speaking of the capitalists who strive only for profit, only to get rich, I do not want to say that these are the most worthless people capable of doing nothing else. Many of them undoubtedly possess great organising talent, which I would not dream of denying. We Soviet people learn a lot from the capitalists. But if you mean people who are prepared to reconstruct the world, of course you will not be able to find them in the ranks of those who faithfully serve the cause of profit. ..The capitalist is riveted in profit and nothing can tear him away from it.
I think that television lately has been extremely dark and, in some ways, cynical but I also think that people who are writing those shows probably feel exactly as I do - that sometimes the darkness of a story can highlight the light in a story. There's a lot of cynical stuff but I think it may be even more in movies now where you see so many movies about cynical and corrupted characters. That's the state of many movies right now but movies, television, all of culture, there's always going to be a battle between the stories that are cynical and stories that are hopeful.
Often when people first hear this part of the Secret they recall events in history where masses of lives were lost, and they find it incomprehensible that so many people could have attracted themselves to the event. By the law of attraction, they had to be on the same frequency as the event. . . .those thoughts of fear, separation, and powerlessness, if persistent, can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time
What does this system seem designed to do? As I see it, it seems designed to send people right back to prison, which is what happens about 70% of the time.
I did all the usual things. I think I did everything that everybody else does. I did auditions. I went to see people. I went to see the right people in some instances, the wrong people in others. The wrong time in others. The right time in others. Nothing seemed to make any difference. I quit 5 times! I always went back to try again when circumstances came around to it.
Since poetry is infinitely valuable, I do not understand why it should be more valuable than this or that which is also infinitelyvaluable. There are artists who perhaps do not think art to be too great, for this is impossible, and yet they are not free enough to be able to rise above their own best accomplishments.
I love donating my time and serving other people. Just seeing the faces of people in need light up when they see you... There is no way I can put it into words. You feel like you did something right.
If I ever go to West Africa, it would probably be for a free concert. I would want to do something for the people there. Maybe we can make a whole event, the way Bob Marley would have done it. Just for the people. And if they climb over the gate, let them climb over the gate.
People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization
There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty.
On my first European solo tour, I was selling maybe 50 tickets a city until I showed up in Paris and heard the show was already at 150 tickets, which, at the time, really blew my mind and took me by complete surprise.
Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now."
I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too.
Slavery, you know, is nothing else than the unwilling labor of many. Therefore to get rid of slavery it is necessary that people should not wish to profit by the forced labor of others and should consider it a sin and a shame. But they go and abolish the external form of slavery and arrange so that one can no longer buy and sell slaves, and they imagine and assure themselves that slavery no longer exists, and do not see or wish to see that it does, because people still want and consider it good and right to exploit the labor of others.
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