A Quote by Mikhail Gorbachev
Even today, a majority of people surveyed say that they regret the fact that the USSR collapsed. But only 9 percent say that they would want it back.
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[Grandfather] would manufacture funnies with Grandmother before she died about how he was in love with other women who were not her. She knew it was only funnies because she would laugh in volumes. 'Anna,' he would say, 'I am going to marry that one with the pink hat.' And she would say, 'To whom are you going to marry her?' And he would say, 'To me.' I would laugh very much in the back seat, and she would say to him, 'But you are no priest.' And he would say, 'I am today.' And she would say, 'Today you believe in God?' And he would say, 'Today I believe in love.
[Albert]Camus had denounced the gulag and Stalin's trials. Today we can see that he was right. To say that there were concentration camps in the USSR at the time was blasphemous, something very serious indeed. Today we think about the USSR with the camps also in mind, but before it just wasn't allowed. Nobody was allowed to think that or say that if you were left-wing.
70 percent of Turkey?s citizens favored the EU; today it is only 50 percent. If you ask if they want Turkey to become an EU member, 60 to 65 percent still say yes. But if you ask: Do you believe Europe will accept Turkey, 60 percent say no.
I can only say what I have lived and experienced. And the majority of people who have been to Makhachkala have come back with different opinions. It's a relaxed city but very lively, like many of the capitals in the world. At first sight, you would never say that there are political problems.
Why wouldn't somebody have the same legal rights as everybody else in our society? What is that about? I don't even understand them putting same sex marriage on the ballot. So if fifty-one percent of the people say it shouldn't happen, it's not going to happen? You can get fifty-one percent of the people to say just about anything - to say let's bring back slavery, or all Mexicans should be slaves, or something absolutely crazy like that. Does that mean we do it?
We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
Of 472 civilian occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, only six are majority immigrant (legal and illegal). These six occupations account for 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Many jobs often thought to be overwhelmingly done by immigrants are in fact majority native-born: 51 percent of maids are U.S.-born, as are 63 percent of butchers and meat processors, and 73 percent of janitors.
People say 'Why would you learn Dutch? Nobody speaks it. Why not French?' Even the Dutch say that to me! I say because I want to live here, I think it's only common courtesy that I speak the language.
When the USSR collapsed, I was 11, and unlike many people, I don't miss it.
I get recognized by some people in my community, but not a lot. In fact, they would say, 'What do you do?' And I would say, 'Well, I did 'The Bernie Mac Show.'' And they would say, 'Oh, really? Well, do you know so-and-so?' And I'd say, 'Yeah, I hired them. I was the boss!' They don't believe it.
If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don't really know. I wouldn't even want to say. And I'd even go on and say, I don't even think so.
Peace is here now. It's just that we don't recognize it. Let's say that 98 percent of people in the world are wanting peace. Now people say, even people from Siberia? Yes. We want world peace. The two percent is really tying to mess it up. It's so sad in a way, because by messing it up what are they going to get? Their children are going to suffer, their grandchildren are going to suffer, and they might even die before something gets good.
My personal sense of humor is edgy, I would say more cable-like: words you're not allowed to say, ideas that the majority of people might say, "That's too risqué for me."
Only 20 percent of employees working in large organizations surveyed feel their strengths are in play every day. Thus, eight our of ten employees surveyed feel somewhat miscast in their role.
I would hate to say as a non-African-American person that it would be wrong for a black person to direct white people in a movie. Wouldn't that be awful of me to say that? The only sympathizing thing I might say for people that want to [grumble] is that a filmmaker should have an understanding for the place where the people you're portraying are coming from.
If unemployment could be brought down to say 2 percent at the cost of an assured steady rate of inflation of 10 percent per year, or even 20 percent, this would be a good bargain.
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