Top 1200 Baker Street Quotes & Sayings - Page 11

I'm a street fighter.

Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street -- a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American.

President Bush Sr. and Secretary Baker, way back when, told Gorbachev, "We are not going to advance NATO into Eastern Europe. We're not going to - we're not going to advance NATO into East Germany, if you allow the unification of Germany." Where is that pledge? Where is the logic behind a military alliance, devised in the time of communism, before the Berlin Wall fell, now being in the Ukraine, in Poland, in Estonia, in Latvia and Lithuania? I don't understand.

Bourbon Street is like playing, a tourist, you know? It's just a tourist attraction ... those musicians on Bourbon Street, they play all day. They might start at 12 noon and end at 3 in the morning, like, it's like sets, like a job. You go play, take a break, play again, take a break, then later on that night, the club gets busier, then you play some more. There's pride. They're a group of great musicians- and they're holding it down.

I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall Street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes one hundred thousand dollars there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to race fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall Street, and I cannot help that.

We must avoid the spiritual disease of the Church that can become self-referential: when this happens, the Church itself becomes sick. It’s true that accidents can happen when you go out into the street, as can happen to any man or woman. But if the Church remains closed onto itself, self-referential, it grows old. Between a Church that goes into the street and gets into an accident and a Church that is sick with self-referentiality, I have no doubts in preferring the first.

People ask me all the time, 'How can I walk in these heels?' I answer with the best compliment I remember that came from a woman who lives here in Paris...I know my street much better. Heels permit me to take the time to look at the architecture of my street. Now I take time to look at things.' High heels give you time to think, to look at your surroundings- a camel has seen more in life than a very quick horse! Women should live to rhythm of high-heeled shoes!

In Shanghai, I saw great contrasts. On one street there would be impressive shops selling copies of the latest word in glamorous European fashion, and around the corner on a back street there were poor families crammed into one room with a naked light bulb. One evening I heard a Chinese family singing "Happy Birthday." It was weird. You would have thought that they'd have their own happy birthday song. Every dominant society in the world - whether it's French or British or American - imposes its culture on less developed societies.

It's nice to be recognized in the street.

The best art is on the street.

I was a street footballer.

When you get to work with great people like on our movie, Blake and Ellen Burstyn and Harrison and Kathy Baker, Amanda Crew, the first minute or two it's like, 'Oh my God, I'm working with you,or Harrison,' people you've admired for so long, after like five minutes you realize we're all trying to do the same thing, we all have a passion for telling good stories and we're going to try to make the story the best possible.

I had a lot of preconceived notions going in the Wall Street. It wasn't an industry that I really respected much. My feeling was kind of like look, you're not making anything. You're taking money from one place, putting it in another and taking your cut and that's just not really kind of soul-satisfying at the end of the day, but what I learned is, on a larger scale is how much the Wall Street industry funnels and fuels so many others. There is a lot of good that these guys do, and to lump all traders into a category is as insane as lumping any group of people into one category.

Communication is not a one-way street.

No one recognises me in the street.

I kinda came into my manhood, or what I thought was my adulthood, early. I had to show up, and I had to make sure I had gas money, food money, rent money, clothes money - everything was on me, startin' at that age, so that's what led me to start hustlin', that's what led me to start to try to find ways to fend for myself. And once I did that, I was full-time, bein' in the street, and, bein' in the street, it's cold. It's the way the streets operate, and you have to adapt to that.

There was the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose with few exceptions, got all of that Church. My wife had some relations in the Presbyterian churches, and some in the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, and was suspected of being a Deist and had talked of fighting a duel.

If you do street music, do it. So be it. That's not me.

If you're a gunfighter, you like to die in the street.

The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

Some street jokes are just timeless. There's an old street joke about comedians. The joke is that a beautiful girl comes up to a comedian at the end of the night and says, "I saw your show tonight, and I just loved it. I want to go home with you, and I'll do anything you want." And the comedian says, "Were you at the 7 or the 9?" That's just a perfect joke, because it points out how egomaniacal and obsessive comedians are. Even though I'm not waiting for a groupie, I can completely understand it. It just defines how comedians are driven.

The street has its own use for things.

God doesn't seem to talk to people like he used to. Who's he talking to now? I don't know. Then I'm walking down the street in Manhattan one day, and I realize maybe it's those guys you see walking down the street talking to themselves. You know, those guys that are like, 'I can't! No, I can't!' Maybe the other side of that conversation is God going, 'You're the new leader.' 'No I can't!' They're not crazy - they're reluctant prophets.

Any Black person in amerika [sic], if they are being honest with themselves, have got to come to the conclusion that they don't know what it feels like to be free. We aren't free politically, economically, or socially. We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a Black person isn't free to walk down the street. Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night, and you know what happens.

I saw in Chicago, on the street where I was visiting my sister-in-law, this "Urban Renewal" and it means one thing: "Negro removal." But they want to tear the homes down and put a parking lot there. Where are those people going? Where will they go? And as soon as Negroes take to the street demonstrating, one hears people say, "they shouldn't have done it." The world is looking at America and it is really beginning to show up for what it is really like. "Go Tell It on the Mountain." We can no longer ignore this, that America is not "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

The Carlyle Group is the most politically connected investment firm in the world. The company has mastered the art of influence peddling on a global scale, hiring executives and consultants ranging from Republican power broker James Baker and former president George Herbert Walker Bush to foreign leaders like former British prime minister John Major and former Philippine president Fidel Ramos.

I will talk about Baker Mayfield. I like everything about his makeup. I like how his teammates really rally behind him. I like his eyes downfield. I like his accuracy with his deep throws. I like how he shows that fighter's spirit; when it comes time to come back, he's fighting through to come back, and I applaud those things.

Die Hard With A Vengeance shooting was a great time, because we had an interesting script. The first script was called Simon Says, and something was going on, because some days we'd get to work, but we wouldn't actually have dialogue. We would go to Bruce's Willis trailer, and they'd say, "Okay, you have to go from 168th Street to 97th Street today. We're going to do it in the cab, and Sam, you say this. Bruce, what do you want to say?" And that's how Bruce's "hey, Zeus!" thing came up.

Maybe we should shut Wall Street down for 24 hours, see how everybody who blames Wall Street for everything likes that. Maybe we should shut energy down for 24 hours, see how people like that.

The language of the street is always strong.

It's hard for comic actors used to pulling faces just to be on screen, but Tina Fey does a good job. I liked watching her. The part, though, isn't filled in. When Baker announces that she's gotten too used to the madness of Afghanistan, that she's worried she's thinking of it as normal, the sentiment comes out of nowhere. The dramatic arc in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" is nonexistent. The movie evaporates in the mind like water in the Afghan desert.

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.

Street fashion forever.

The whole financial structure of Wall Street seems to rise or fall on the mere fact that the Federal Reserve Bank raises or lowers the amount of interest. Any business that can't survive a one percent change must be skating on thin ice. Why even the poor farmer took a raise of another ten percent just to get a loan from the bank, and nobody from the government paid any attention. But you let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help to get them back into bed again.

I was quite reluctant in the first instance to come to use the word bisexual with regard to myself because I didn't feel any different inside from the way I had always felt. I always found men attractive. I still find men attractive. I figure out of, you know, every 200 men that pass on the street, I'm going to go, 100 of those are nice looking guys. Now, with every 200 women that pass on the street, maybe one is going to turn my head.

The first thing Julian wanted to do in life, well, before he wanted to be an artist and then a musician, was to be a chef. He'd come home and say 'Why don't you bake cakes like my friends' mothers?' I'd say, 'Oh, Julian, go out and buy a Mary Baker cake mix and do it yourself!' That started him off! By the time he was 13, he'd disappear into the kitchen whenever we had visitors and emerge with beautiful canapes. Now he thinks nothing of cooking for ten or 15 people, and he does it so calmly.

I was a street dancer.

I'm from the street. We all know that.

The street is no place to race.

Building places that are worth living in and worth caring about require a certain attention to detail, and of a particular kind of detail that we have forgotten how to design and assemble. And that involves the relationship of the buildings to each other, the relationship of the buildings to the public space, which in America, comes mostly in the form of the street. Because it's only the exceptional places in America that have the village square or the New England green. You know. The street is mostly the public realm of America. And we have to design these things so that they reward us.

Respect is not a one way street

I've been in so many street fights.

If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.

The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms-Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns-was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degress, and every one of them was always just twenty-four hours away from a funding crisis. The key to day-to-day survival was the skill with which Wall Street executives managed their firms' ongoing reputation in the marketplace.

If you believe a black cat is bad luck, people think you're crazy, but plenty of times, if I see a black cat down my street, I turn around and go the other way. Even if I'm late. I'll be late for the airport and be in a limo, and if I see a black cat, I'll be like, 'Sir, you have to turn around and go down the next street.'

My job - and it's really true - is that it's constantly evolving and changing. When I was doing the Chet Baker movie I was obsessed with playing the trumpet, and to my absolute shock I haven't picked the trumpet up since we wrapped. It was so much work. I thought I was going to keep playing the rest of my life, 'cause it was fun, it's just a lot of work. And it's a really unique job that exposes you to a lot.

All the coverage of skateboarding sucks. They couldn't care less when it comes to how skateboarding is portrayed. All I can do is portray it the right way when it comes to me. So skateboarders can look at what I'm doing and say, "Yeah, the only person doing it the right way is him." That's why Street Dreams was so important in being 100% true to skate culture. That's why the Wild Grinders are important in showing the different styles of street skating. That's why I get involved in building the skate parks. All I can do is show skateboarding the right way.

There is equality in the office but not on the street.

I lived on the street myself.

Every age, race, socio-economic background of men are 'johns.' It's a little more complicated who's doing the selling. The truth is that the average street pimp selling American girls is often a man of color, however, Mexican pimps are selling Mexican girls, Russian men are selling Russian girls etc. Those who profit off the sex industry overall are not the ones who are standing out on the street. They're the owners of massage parlors, escort agencies, strip clubs, and brothels.

Fashion is in the sky, in the street.

Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them.

Well, the movie isn't bad. For a while, I even told myself I liked it, even as it missed one mark after another. But in the end, it's shapeless and blandly apolitical, apart from its watered-down feminism. You see, Fey's Kim Baker - changed from Barker - transforms herself from a neophyte reporter, condescended to by male war correspondents, soldiers and Afghan officials, into a hard-charging political animal who speaks the language fluently and parties as hard as men. That's about as edgy as a sitcom.

The similarities between street drug abuse and psychotropic prescription drug use are disturbing. Both types are toxic. Both can cause psychosis, damage the brain and other organs, and even cause death. And neither type of mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, treats disease. It's important to recognize that the only significant difference between many prescription psychotropic drugs and street drugs such as "speed" and "downers" is that prescription drugs are legal.

I'm not in Wall Street for my health.

Everything that's happening in our world is a function of what is going on inside of people. We are violent in our minds. We are violent with one another. We walk past one another in the street and don't even look nor make eye contact - don't speak. We can be outraged about the missiles and the planes. I'm more outraged that somebody will walk past me in the street and not look me in the face and say good morning.

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.

Street raps have to be masculine.

Managing the other fellow's business is a fascinating game. Trade unionists all over the country have pronounced ideas for the reform of Wall Street banks; and Wall Street bankers are not far behind in giving plans for the tremendous improvement of trade union policies. Wholesalers have schemes for improving the retailer; the retailer knows just what is wrong in the conduct of wholesale business-and we might go through a long list.... Yet for some reason the classes that ought to be helped keep on stubbornly clinging to their own method of running their affairs.

The street is a room by agreement.