Quotes on Ifs

I'm a part of a team, and I'm no better or any worse than any single player on this team. That's the approach I've always had and will continue to have. It's not about me. It has never been all about me. If it had, this would have been a really lonely journey.

Marriage is like a temple resting on two pillars. If they come too close to each other the temple will collapse.

If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. It's very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy - a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they're required to keep an agreement with you only if you're successful or they need you.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.

If every basketball player worked as hard as I did, I'd be out of a job

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were on my knees.

Acting has to do with saying it as if you meant it, so for me the words are always very important. It's very important for me to know my lines, know them so well that I don't have to think about them.

He is always doing something--the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.

If you want risk taking, set an example yourself and reward and praise those that do.

If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

If you should encounter angry or unkind actions today, take a deep breath, reach deep within and greet the lack of love with love.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men.

If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.

If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.

Decisive moment: the one when you will be really alone. And it is perhaps this that makes her hesitate: not the void, but the vastness of the solitude. It's as well if you are frightened of solitude. It's a sign that you have come to the moment of your birth.

Some people seem to believe that for each problem there is a solution readily available - a solution that can be promptly achieved by passing a law and voting some money. I think of this as the vending machine concept of social change. Put a coin in the machine and out comes a piece of candy. If there is a social problem, pass a law and out comes a solution.