Pastoral Resources

We are a fact-gathering organization only. We don't clear anybody. We don't condemn anybody.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons... But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway.

Politics is about winning. If you don't win, you don't get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.

In practice, socialism didn't work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.

What the left says sounds very good but, in practice, it works out very badly.

Mike Leigh encourages you to choose a person that you know to base your character on. You write a whole list of people that you know and you go through that list in great depth with him. And then he chooses one of those people from your list.

In the case of Iraq, notwithstanding the violence there at the moment, the very fact that a hideous regime - responsible for genocide, for the use of chemical and biological weapons, aggression against two neighbors - has been removed in itself is a positive development.

Action cures fear, inaction creates terror.

Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.

One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.

I finally faced the fact that it isn't a crime not having friends. Being alone means you have fewer problems.

There is nothing like practice.

Parents, however old they and we may grow to be, serve among other things to shield us from a sense of our doom. As long as they are around, we can avoid the fact of our mortality; we can still be innocent children.

I'm not running away from the fact that I had previously said I did not contemplate a major increase, and that was a fair statement of the Government's state of mind at the time I made that.

You just drop a character like this that and the other and it's done.

Every role you play is literally - and I've said this before - every single role that you play, the only way you can connect to that character is because that was a piece of you that was scattered around that yard, almost like we got caught up in some whirlwind.

A young man is a theory, an old man is a fact.

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.