Orson Welles Quotes

“A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.”

“Take a step back to recall the story that this book tells, and consider how it might come to a very unhappy ending. Imagine the history our disappointed descendants might write. For centuries, the moral teachings of a civilization held self—interest and self-trust to be the sins of frail and deluded humanity. These traditional teachings denied that societies could discern distinct and viable principles of order and design their own institutions accordingly. The denounced such efforts as doomed hubris. Then, in an unprecedented experiment, some people rejected the old wisdom. They took the heart’s desire and the body’s appetite as compass points and rededicated human ingenuity to serving them. They created new forms of order to house these inverted values. For a time, the experiment succeeded, changing life so dramatically that the utopian visions of one century became the pedestrian common sense of the next.Then, suddenly and drastically, the experiment failed. Self-interest and self-trust proved to be formulas for devastating the world. Democratic polities, the other moral center of the great experiment, could not stop runaway self-destruction and turned out to abet it instead. Faced with overwhelming evidence that they were on an unsustainable course, the freedom-loving peoples of the twenty-first century wrung their hands, congratulated themselves on their hybrid cars and locally grown food, and changed little, because it never made sense for anyone or any country to do so.”

“The equality of tolerance is not that far from indifference, and very far from the equality of opportunity that LBJ envisioned.”

“When I turned 16 and got my license, the Chevy Blazer was passed down from my sister, so it was very much a starter car.”

“I don't want to see myself as this sad, disabled girl. I know that. I don't want other people to see me as that, either.”

“I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins.”

“You don't have to be positive all the time.”

“I feel that losing both my legs was a blessing. It was meant to happen to me: I wouldn't have had the opportunity to touch so many lives in such a positive way.”

“I've never wanted sympathy votes in anything I do in my life.”

“I got this second chance at life, and I live it.”