Albie Sachs Quotes

To respond in kind to the violence of apartheid was just wrong. Terrorism was based on the use of indiscriminate violence, directed at civilian people because they happened to belong to a particular group, race, or community. [ ... ] It was completely antithetical to our ideals. We were fighting for justice against the system of white supremacy, not against a race. ~ Albie Sachs

Primitive does not mean stupid. ~ Albie Sachs

My ideal weight is moobless. ~ Albie Sachs

All revolutions are impossible until they happen. Then they become inevitable ~ Albie Sachs

Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation. ~ Albie Sachs

The difference between the past and the present is that individual freedom and security no longer fall to be protected solely through the D vehicle of common-law maxims and presumptions which may be altered or repealed by statute, but are now protected by entrenched constitutional provisions which neither the Legislature nor the Executive may abridge. It would accordingly be improper for us to hold constitutional a system which, as Sachs J has noted, confers on creditors the power to consign the person of an impecunious debtor to prison at will and without the interposition at the crucial time of a judicial officer. ~ Pius Langa

The only thing worse than the failure of this massive global development experiment, would be its success. ~ Wolfgang Sachs

But silence is where victims dwell. ~ Nelly Sachs

The rich control our politics to a huge extend. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich. ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

The rich do not have to invest enough in the poorest countries to make them rich; they need to invest enough so that these countries can get their foot on the economic ladder ... Economic development works. It can be successful. It tends to build on itself. But it must get started. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

One of the key psychological characteristics of the Tea Party is its oxymoronic love of authority figures coupled with a narcissistic celebration of its own "revolutionary" defiance. It's this psychic weakness that allows this segment of the population to be manipulated by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. The advantage is that their willingness to take orders has allowed them to organize effectively (try getting one hundred progressives at a meeting focused on anything). The downside is, they see absolutely nothing weird in launching a revolution based upon the ravings of a guy who's basically a half-baked PR stooge shoveling propaganda coal for bloodsucking transnational behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. ~ Matt Taibbi

I try to keep feeling what's going on and try to use the camera, the actors and the design to enhance those feelings. There's something really emotionally direct and honest about how I put the material with the images. You hope that the strength of mise-en-scene comes from an honesty towards the material. You also hire really well. ~ Ira Sachs

From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. This world exists simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah. ~ Teju Cole

Sustainability, or fairness to the future, therefore involves the concept of stewardship, the idea that the living generation must be stewards of the earth's resources for the generations that will come later. That's a tough role to play. There is nothing natural or innate about it. We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will. Yet those are our descendants and our fellow humanity. Alas, it's a role that we've mostly ignored till now, to the increasing peril of all who will follow. The ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood. ~ Ira Sachs

This is our greatest challenge: learning to live in a crowded and interconnected world that is creating unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing ... ~ Barry Ritholtz

All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where there was grass and not bothering them at all on the pavement. The fire came as high as their waists, their chests, gorgeous beyond anything they'd seen, the rippling orange sheets hanging in the air like a desert mirage, like something that was there and not there. Black smoke curled above the flames, announcing to the neighborhood this very private thing that Albie had made. Fire! Fire! they'd be calling in the industrial park, even though it was already starting to die out around the edges. The fire needed so much. The boys could see it looking for more grass, anything to keep itself alive. It would have happily burned them up if it meant going for another minute. ~ Ann Patchett

Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting! ~ Douglas Rushkoff

I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.' ~ Ira Sachs

You can understand why good publicists go on to run distribution companies: because the creativity involved is complex and nuanced. ~ Ira Sachs

Similarly, though the United States is one of the world's richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn't cost much, but showing off does. ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

We mothers rock into the heart of the world the melody of peace. ~ Nelly Sachs

Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York. ~ Ira Sachs

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling. ~ Ira Sachs

Fighting bitterness can be a full-time job. ~ Ira Sachs

Everyone wants to belong, and everyone needs to belong in order to make a career on some level. ~ Ira Sachs

Chorus of Comforters

We are gardeners who have no flowers,
No herb may be transplanted
From yesterday to tomorrow.
The sage has faded in the cradles--
Rosemary lost its scent facing the new dead--
Even wormwood was only bitter yesterday.
The blossoms of comfort are too small
Not enough for the torment of a child's tear.

New seed may perhaps be gathered
In the heart of a nocturnal singer.
Which of us may comfort?
In the depth of the defile
Between yesterday and tomorrow
The cherub stands
Grinding the lightnings of sorrow with his wings
But his hands hold apart the rocks
Of yesterday and tomorrow
Like the edges of a wound

Which must remain open
That may not yet heal.

The lightnings of sorrow do not allow
The field of forgetting to fall asleep.

Which of us may comfort?

We are gardeners who have no flowers
And stand upon a shining star
And weep. ~ Nelly Sachs

I started making movies in the early '90s, a few years after I discovered 'the cinema' during a three month stay in Paris during which I watched 100s of films. ~ Ira Sachs

To me, a fairy tale seems to have become reality. ~ Nelly Sachs

Mysterious can be cool, if you're in Hollywood and everyone's happy. But it can be really bad if people perceive that the financial interests are adversarial, that there's money versus people. A lot of Goldman Sachs people went into government, so at a time when there's a distrust of institutions, some of that reflects on us. ~ Lloyd Blankfein

I can show up at a Goldman Sachs conference wearing a Judas Priest T-shirt - and I have - while everyone else is wearing the same dress. ~ Sophia Amoruso

Jeff Sachs has the Millennium Villages. He spends $2.5 million in one village. It's an absolutely ridiculous model, because I've said that if you gave me $2.5 million, I can train 100 grandmothers, solar electrify 100 villages - 10,000 houses - and save you 100,000 litres of kerosene. ~ Bunker Roy

Most simply but profoundly, I chose to live an honest life, which I think as a gay person is not a given. ~ Ira Sachs

It's not an accident that the U.S. ranks lowest of all major donor countries in the world - that is the share of our income that goes to development aid. Americans will ask whether, because were so generous privately, that makes up the difference. But it doesn't. We still rank far below other countries. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

In the earliest cultures any tie between the dancers is slight. In a higher level the choral dancers almost always touch one another and thus force themselves into the same stride and the same movement. The closer the contact, the stronger is the social character of the choral. ~ Curt Sachs

The dance is the mother of the arts, The dance breaks down the distinction of body & soul. ~ Curt Sachs

Our interconnectedness on the planet is the dominating truth of the 21st century. One stark result is that the world's poor live, and especially die, with the awareness that the United States is doing little to mobilise the weapons of mass salvation that could offer them survival, dignity and eventually the escape from poverty. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

The essence of Africa's crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms-Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns-was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degress, and every one of them was always just twenty-four hours away from a funding crisis. The key to day-to-day survival was the skill with which Wall Street executives managed their firms' ongoing reputation in the marketplace ... ~ William D. Cohan

Business often does a good job supporting communities: the arts, universities, and scientific enterprises ... But that philosophy has rarely reached poor countries. Even businesses that are enlightened in their home bases see Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia as places to exploit natural resources or use cheap labor. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

Even souvenir seekers. One of the worst contaminants was fellow officers, especially brass grandstanding if reporters were present and eager to grab a video bite to slap on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. One more glance at the circular coffin. Okay, Amelia Sachs thought: Knuckle time ... A phrase of her father's. The man had also been cop, a beat patrolman working the Deuce - Midtown South; back then Times Square was like Deadwood in the 1800s. "Knuckle time" referred to those moments when you have to go up against your worst fears. Breadbasket ... Sachs returned to the access door and climbed through it and down into the utility room below the cellar. Then she took the evidence collection gear bag from the other officer. Sachs said, "You search the basement, Jean?" "I'll do it now," Eagleston said. "And then get everything into the RRV." They'd done a fast examination of the cellar. But it was apparent that the perp had spent minimal time there. He'd grabbed Chloe, subdued ~ Jeffery Deaver

The 2003 flu season started early in North America, with the first cases showing up in the fall. By Thanksgiving doctors were seeing the usual flu-related pneumonias. As always, the most severe cases resulted from secondary bacterial infections in flu-congested lungs. ~ Jessica Snyder Sachs