The need for civility in society has never been more important. The foundation of kindness and civility begins in our homes. It is not surprising that our public discourse has declined in equal measure with the breakdown of the family. The family is ...
The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks...
As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got t...
I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pill...
Don't try and do the right thing, because there is no right thing; there's just the right thing for you.
Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and...
The world was in truth made of jackstraws. The world was very combustible, the human body was partible in ways heretofore unimagined. What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. Civilization was not in th...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it’s true—all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed...
A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized.
Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
Act because you love to act.
In the end, every person's life is a tough act to follow.
Some of the best times I've ever had in my life have been because of acting and through acting. But I'm not interested in the game of acting and being an actor and auditioning and all that stuff.
Do not build a castle around one act of kindness; do not build an empire around one act of cruelty.
It's fine to have talent, but talent is the last of it. In an acting career, as in an acting performance, you've got to have vitality. The secret of successful acting is identical with a woman's beauty secret: joy in living.
I love actors, and I love good acting. I love what actors do when they're good, and I'm a big acting fan.
There used to be a lot of acts, which was good, because people don't want to see the same act every night. But, you don't want too many acts, you don't want to over-saturate it.
I discovered that I act because I really love to act. I don't act because maybe it will get me a magazine cover or that I can get on a talk show.
Live-action is more fun for me, because you're acting with people. When you do voice-acting, many times you're not even in the room with the person that you're acting with.
If a critic doesn't think I can act, it's because I'm not acting. That's me - and that's the way I act.
the time is always right to do the right thing
