Most of this film, however, is about interpretation - are these people terrorists or freedom fighters? Are they good or bad? Is cutting timber good or bad? And I don't feel like the answers to those questions are simple, so we don't try to answer them for the audience. I wanted to elicit the strongest - and most heartfelt - arguments from the characters in the film and let those arguments bang up against the strongest arguments of their opponents.
Arguments cannot be answered with insults. . . . Kindness is strength. . . . Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm.
My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home - I think in those days we called them arguments - about who was right and who was wrong.
There are legitimate, even powerful arguments, to be made against the Bush administration's foreign policy. But those arguments are complicated, hard to explain, and, in the end, not all that sensational.
Generally speaking, I tend to think that whether a philosopher's views are true is a poor test of their quality. What matter are the arguments they give, and the insights those arguments inspire.
I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not; but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them.
My coach and I will have these arguments where I am in pain or something is wrong, and I won't tell him because I feel like I need to train. We have a blow-up of arguments, and he says, 'Shelly, you need to tell me when these things are happening.'
I was born with the wrong sign
In the wrong house
With the wrong ascendancy
I took the wrong road
That led to
The wrong tendencies
I was in the wrong place
At the wrong time
For the wrong reason
And the wrong rhyme
On the wrong day
Of the wrong week
Used the wrong method
With the wrong technique
Wrong
Wrong.
Whatever insults my State insults me.
I do think [in USA] is a need for change. There is something wrong when you have $20 trillion of debt and crumbling infrastructure at the same time, and really fewer people employed than have been. Something is wrong.
If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.
Conscience is the reason employed about questions of right and wrong.
Even if I was a bad right wing guy, to the extent of whether my arguments are right or wrong, they're right or wrong independently if I'm right or left.
Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science.
I'm very happy to be employed. I always contend that in show business that if you're employed, then you're successful.
There are skeptics who do not come to their view because they have a source of income from carbon polluters. I don't mean to imply that they're all in that category at all. There are also those who are also not motivated by ideological resistance for any role of government. But I don't know of any arguments or any presenters of arguments that overturn the consensus that I think have gained any legitimacy.