A Quote by Shana Alexander

Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative.
A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.
Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking nothing in return. With contempt you don't need to right the wrong (as with anger) or flee the scene (as with fear or disgust). And the best of all, contempt is made to share. Stories about the moral failings of others are among the most common kinds of gossip, they are a stable of talk radio, and they offer a ready way for people to show that they share a common moral orientation.
I get a lot of death threats. But the way I look at it, I feel I have a moral obligation to do the best I can to make the country better for everybody, and that threatens certain people because they're going to have much less power. I want the power to go back to people making decisions over their own lives rather than some experts making it.
The best song is what resonates with that one person the most. It's why, if you ask a million people on the face of the Earth, they're all gonna have different favorite songs, their own best song ever, because that's the one that touched them the most.
Proximity is power. If you can get proximity with people that are the best in the world, things can happen because all of the people they know, the insights they have and the life experience they have. They can save you a decade of time by one insight.
It would be inadmissible if I would vent my opinion publicly. Not only could I harm the artist concerned seriously because people have so much respect for me and believe in me because of my musical accomplishments. And I could also antagonize people against me, because everyone has his own taste. We all make music, people can choose from that what they like. Every musician likes his own music the best, man. I don't want to attack that. I don't mind criticism, I can handle it, but most people can't".
How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal need. Political time moves at a snail's pace because it is only with nearly insurmountable difficulty that moral discomfort takes root in the best of people, forcing an imperative out of a complaint; so viscerally repugnant is it for a critical mass to find the prevailing system unbearable, much less prepare to take up arms against it.
I think it’s time to open the books on questions that have remained in the dark on the question of government investigations of UFOs. It’s time to find out what the truth really is that’s out there. We ought to do it because it’s right. We ought to do it because the American people, quite frankly, can handle the truth. And we ought to do it because it’s the law.
If America becomes militant, it will be because its people choose to become such; it will be because they think that war and warlikeness are desirable.
But there'll be plenty of room on Earth then because right now, what is it?-Only one-fifth of the Earth's surface is land, right? Whereas then there will be no more sea, it'll all be land, seas will be gone. The seas are the World's great septic tanks, its great cesspools, where all the waste of the World drains off into the sea.
Conservatives believe in traditional values. Not because we want to impose our views on anyone, but because to abandon those values would be to ignore our history. Americans are not the most generous people on earth because our laws make us generous. People do not contribute to charity in this country in record amounts because we have a tax break from it. We do so because this nation has been shaped by Judeo-Christian principles that teach us that we have an obligation to care for one another.
It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
To be a great composer requires immense experience... One acquires this by listening not only to other men's work, but above all to one's own!
There are many people of cosmopolitan temperament who are not from the elites of their societies or the world; and while, for a variety of reasons, I think a cosmopolitan spirit does naturally go with city life, that's the life of a very large proportion of human beings today. And I don't think rural people can't be cosmopolitan, in my sense.
It is easy for Americans to forget a simple fact that is very clear to the people around the world that yearn to live in this country: America is the best country in the entire damn world! It deserves to be made great again, because America is, in the words of President Ronald Reagan, 'the last best hope of mankind.'
It is those people who know that they are right because some outside or higher power conveys the conviction to them who do the great damage in the world.
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