Top 683 Johnny Quotes & Sayings - Page 12

I think for my parents it was like "A Boy Named Sue," the Johnny Cash song. A guy named Sue tries to track down his father to take it out on his father for naming him Sue. And his father says, "Look, I knew I wasn't going to be around. So I gave you the name so that you would grow up strong enough to take the hits and fight back." So I like to believe that's why my parents gave me this stupid name.

I was starting to play the ukulele at the same time I was having all these conversations with [the late Ramones guitarist] Johnny Ramone, these intense tutorials staying up late and listening to the music he grew up on, and picking up what's a great song and what makes a great song. He was all about lists and dissecting songs, like what's a better song by Cheap Trick: "No Surrender" or "Dream Police"? Sometimes you'd be surprised by the answer. It was an interesting dichotomy between hanging out with the godfather of punk rock and starting to play the ukulele. They came together.

In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o'clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.

These are the saddest of possible words, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. Trio of Bear Cubs fleeter than birds, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double, Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. This brief poem, immortalized the Chicago Cubs' double-play combination: Shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance.

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over.

Most of the time when I have met artists who have meant a lot to me, the experience has been well above expectation. People like Iggy, Lou Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, Black Sabbath, Nick Cave, Hubert Selby Jr, Billy Gibbons, Al Pacino, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Johnny Cash etc. have been really great to me. What strikes me is most of the time, the bigger the celeb/legend, the more polite and cool they are. It's the insecure ones who treat you like they're doing you a favor by shaking your hand.

I've never thought it was a good idea to act back-to-back. If you are going to have any chance of replicating life, you need to live it. I also never forgot something Johnny Depp said to me, which Marlon Brando said to him, 'You only have so many faces in your pocket.' I really admire artists who take the time to recharge their batteries and not continually call on it. I think you can spot tired and jaded artists quite quickly.

I'll (Phil Rizzuto) never forget September 6, 1950. I got a letter threatening me, Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra and Johnny Mize. It said if I showed up in uniform against the Red Sox I'd be shot. I turned the letter over to the FBI and told my manager Casey Stengel about it. You know what Casey did? He gave me a different uniform and gave mine to Billy Martin. Can you imagine that! Guess Casey thought it'd be better if Billy got shot.

We went down [Folsom Prison] and there's a rodeo at all these shows that the prisoners have there. And in between the rodeo things, they asked me to set up and do two or three songs. So that was what I did. I did "Folsom Prison Blues," which they thought was their song - you know? - and "I Walk The Line," "Hey Porter," "Cry, Cry, Cry." And then the word got around on the grapevine that Johnny Cash is all right and that you ought to see him.

It was really special for Bass Pro Shops to take Tracker off the side and put Joplin, Missouri on there. They have helped me a lot this past week with putting together ways to raise money to help rebuild Joplin. It's my hometown. It was heartbreaking to see the tornado and see all the people that lost their homes and the ones that lost their lives. It is really special that Johnny let us put that on there. Hopefully we made some people proud tonight.

Johnny Valentine's the one who said, 'I can't make them believe that wrestling is real, but I can make them believe I'm real.' It would take him forever because he was just stinkingly boring for 30 minutes of the 40-minute match, but he would let people hit him as hard as they could, and he would hit people as hard as he could.

When I was five, a tree was my best friend. An old peppercorn on Grandpa's little farm. I'd haul myself into its calloused arms and hide from the world in its foliage. Apart from the pleasure of looking down on unsuspecting adults, I could be Robin Hood in a one-tree Sherwood Forest or Johnny Weissmuller in his jungle. I fell out of my friend once while Tarzan-ing. Gashed a large chunk from a leg. Almost 70 years later, there's still a scar.

There's something really the matter with most people who wear tattoos. There's at least some terrible story. I know from experience that there's always something terribly flawed about people who are tattooed, above some little something that Johnny had done in the Navy, even though that's a bad sign...It's terrible. Psychologically it's crazy. Most people who are tattooed, it's the sign of some feeling of inferiority, they're trying to establish some macho identification for themselves.

The fact is that Britain is the most warlike nation on earth. In the history of armed combat, we are the only democracy to have declared war on another democracy - England versus Finland in the second world war, in case you're interested - and we're always at the front of the queue when Johnny Foreigner gets a bit uppity. Who stood up to the Kaiser? Who stood up to Adolf? And let's not forget the Argies. What other country would have sent its fleet halfway round the world and lost 250 men to protect a flock of sheep and some oil that might or might not be there? We're still at it.

In '84 there was Raheem, Slim Jukebox, and Sir Rap-A-Lot. Those were the first three members of the Geto Boys with DJ Ready Red. By '85 it was Prince Johnny C, Slim Jukebox, Bushwick Bill, and DJ Ready Red. By '89 it was Scarface, Willie D, Bushwick Bill, and Ready Red.

Sorry Johnny." "Sorry for what " "For shouting at you. It's just that when I think about the future I keep panicking. It's like falling from the top of the stairs in the dark not knowing where I'll end up." He put his arm around my shoulders. "I understand. Life is precarious for most of us but more so for you. What you forget is what most of your friends see in you." "What's that " "The ability to beat the odds..." "And fall on my feet " He nodded. "I just hope that lasts." "It will Catkin it will. It wouldn't dare fail you.

Bernard [Leach] knew Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon, Johnny Wells. I can think of a number of people that we met there just because we were living with Bernard. Some of them became our friends, particularly the younger artists, but we were privileged to at least meet and talk with the older artists also. And they would come to dinner, and we would simply be included in the conversation, which was quite fascinating.

The gateway to freedom...was somewhere close to New Orleans where most Africans were sorted through and sold. I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I'd been told my great grandfather had lived way back up in the woods among the evergreens in a log cabin. I revived the era with a song about a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode. My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say 'coloured boy' and changed it to 'country boy'.

I look up to actors. I look up to Robert DeNiro, I look up to Johnny Depp, I look up to Al Pacino, I look up to run-of-the-mill really good actors. I love watching movies, and I love watching other actors and learning from them.

I don't collect the way other people do. Some people collect rare guitars, like, 'I have a '54 Strat worth $50,000.' And I don't collect the way Nash does. Nash has Duane Allman's guitar and Johnny Cash's guitar. I bought guitars because they sounded good. I played them, they sounded unbelievably good, and I couldn't resist.

Let's also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I've said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his résumé in, he's getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his résumé in.Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community? In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years. But I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn't have huge numbers of young African American men in jail.

I want to be judged by who I am, not what I am. I mean, I am Johnny Weir. Judge me the way you see me, love me the way you see me, hate me the way you see me.

Johnny Apple, a New York Times correspondent, wrote a front-page story saying Afghanistan could be a quagmire and he was mocked and derided. What is certainly true is that all sorts of resources that would have been used in Afghanistan were diverted to Iraq. Would those resources have helped? Almost undoubtedly. Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.