Walter Becker Quotes

My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians. ~ Walter Becker

I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends. ~ Walter Becker

Packed up the Dylan and the Man Ray and the Joyce
I left a note that said well I guess I got no choice
Scuse me girl while I'm kicking it to the curb
Leaving with all I need but less than I deserve ~ Walter Becker

I'm a self-taught musician aside from what I've been able to pick up from other players. ~ Walter Becker

I prefer a thief to a Congressman. A thief will take your money and be on his way, but a Congressman will stand there and bore you with the reasons why he took it. ~ Walter E. Williams

There was nothing explicit between them, nothing more than that slightly open door. And yet . . . what could be more alluring? In ~ Jess Walter

It pleased the public to think I lived the easy, carefree life - the playboy of golf. ~ Walter Hagen

Every actor looks all his life for a part that will combine his talents with his personality ... 'The Odd Couple' was mine. That was the plutonium I needed. It all started happening after that. ~ Walter Matthau

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble. ~ Walter Kirn

Wisdom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing them thoroughly; but in choosing and in following what conduces the most certainly to our lasting happiness and true glory. ~ Walter Savage Landor

The ideas I found in books helped me imagine a life I wanted to live. ~ Walter Dean Myers

I've been blessed with pretty strong stamina and healthy genes, so I'd call myself sensible. I've had regular mammograms ever since I found a lump in my breast when I was 30. Thankfully, all was well. ~ Harriet Walter

[Duesberg] is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS. ~ Walter Gilbert

Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Try this thought experiment. Pretend you're a tyrant. Among your many liberty-destroying objectives are extermination of blacks, Jews and Catholics. Which would you prefer, a United States with political power centralized in Washington, powerful government agencies with detailed information on Americans and compliant states or power widely dispersed over 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions and a limited federal government? ~ Walter E. Williams

It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. ~ Walter De La Mare

A landscape painting is essentially emotional in origin. It exists as a record of an effect in nature whose splendour has moved a human heart, and according as it is well or ill done it moves the hearts of others. ~ Walter J. Phillips

Volunteering also honours the sort of work your spouse is obliged to do if you choose cheerfully to do it for him or her. It abolished distinctions and degrees of value. All work is valuable in the house where no work is held in contempt, and where love is not kept in hiding. ~ Walter Wangerin Jr.

Wherever your heart rests There I will live and be blessed I've tried to line up the things I Needed to say but now my feelings just Tumble from me. I am half foolish, Half drunk with wanting you With wanting to take your hand And leap into the darkness of whatever Life will bring. Love makes me Brave and without love I'm made Nothing. ~ Walter Dean Myers

We can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact. ~ Walter Lippmann

Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth's total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism. ~ Walter Kirn

The death of this honorable man upon this battlefield leaves all of us the poorer for his loss, yet so much the richer for the friendship and love and loyalty with which he gifted us in life. May his spirit speed unhindered to the other side to join those already there and to await us until we join him in our own times. ~ Walter C. Conner

In this way all violent bonds and orders are cancelled as if the freedom of the primal world had been restored with one blow. Man, too, is made open and true by this freedom. Wine, as Plutarch says so nicely, frees the soul of subservience, fear, and insincerity; it teaches men how to be truthful and candid with one another. It reveals that which was hidden. Wine and truth have long been associated in proverbs. It is a good thing, so it is said, to search for the truth in earnest conversation while one drinks wine, and agreements arrived at over a wine glass were at one time considered to be the most sacred and inviolable agreements. ~ Walter F. Otto

she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained. I decided ~ Walter Isaacson

Don't sell on bad news. ~ Walter Schloss

An anthology is like all the plums and orange peel picked out of a cake. ~ Walter Raleigh

The body, then, is one's animal fate that has to be struggled against in some ways. At the same time, it offers experiences and sensations, concrete pleasure that the inner symbolic world lacks. No wonder man is impaled on the horns of sexual problems, why Freud saw that sex was so prominent in human life-especially in the neurotic conflicts of his patients. Sex is an inevitable component of man's confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms-symbols (freedom) and body (fate). No wonder, too, that most of us never abandon entirely the early attempts of the child to use the body and its appendages as a fortress or a machine to magically coerce the world. We try to get metaphysical answers out of the body that the body-as a material thing-cannot possibly give. We try to answer the transcendent mystery of creation by experiences in one, partial, physical product of that creation. This is why the mystique of sex is so widely practiced-say, in traditional France-and at the same time is so disillusioning. It is comfortingly infantile in its indulgence and its pleasure, yet so self-defeating of real awareness and growth, if the person is using it to try to answer metaphysical questions. It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness. If the adult reduces the problem of life to the area of sexuality, he repeats the fetishization of the child who focuses the problem of the mother upon her genitals. Sex then becomes a scree ~ Ernest Becker

I quickly decided my zombies weren't really zombies. It was instead something you called people who were on this club drug, who then exhibited aggressive behaviors. And then like everyone who writes about zombies, I found it was so much fun. ~ Jess Walter

A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, 'Delay, Denial and Dilution,' written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care. ~ Walter E. Williams

In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone. ~ Walter Isaacson

It's sad that the BBC is toning down Dennis the Menace for a cartoon series. He is losing his weapons, catapult and peashooter, will no longer pick on Walter the Softy, and his ferocious grimace is to be replaced by a charming, boyish smile. ~ Simon Hoggart

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. ~ Walter Benjamin

So in the twentieth century, there's a major current of American thought―in fact, it's probably the dominant current among people who think about these things [political scientists, journalists, public relations experts and so on]―which says that precisely because the state has lost the power to coerce, elites need to have more effective propaganda to control the public mind. That was Walter Lippmann's point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists―he referred to the population as a "bewildered herd": we have to protect ourselves from "the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd." And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the "manufacture of consent"―if you don't do it by force, you have to do it by the calculated "manufacture of consent. ~ Noam Chomsky

Pure talent and charisma and like gods they were terrible together. Awful. A gorgeous nightmare. ~ Jess Walter

You cannot live this life anymore without the ability to read. ~ Walter Dean Myers

I've successfully lobbied and testified for stalking laws in several states, but I would trade them all for a high school class that would teach young men how to hear "no," and teach young women that it's all right to explicitly reject. ~ Gavin De Becker

Risk is not a dirty word. ~ Walter Wriston

It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed. ~ Walter Mosley