Weiner Quotes

thambos, "that reverential terror and awe aroused by the proximity of any supernatural force or being which one discerns, ~ Eric Weiner

I am announcing my resignation from Congress so my colleagues can get back to work, my neighbors can choose a new representative and most importantly that my wife and I can continue to heal from the damage I have caused. ~ Anthony Weiner

As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.' ... The Brits don't merely enjoy misery, they get off on it. ~ Eric Weiner

The act of underlining always contains an element of self-recognition. ~ Eric Weiner

How could I live a life where the person who'd built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who'd seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone? ~ Jennifer Weiner

The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was. ~ Tim Weiner

I don't like futons. They can't commit. I'm a bed! I'm a couch! I'm a bed! I'm a couch! ~ Jennifer Weiner

The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today's life. ~ Matthew Weiner

seventeen, tells her ~ Jennifer Weiner

Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution's protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The ~ Tim Weiner

If there's anything Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo has taught me, it's that breakdancing is the key to financial solvency. ~ Richard M. Weiner

I don't particularly like being angry about stuff. I'd rather hang out with my daughter and write my little books. ~ Jennifer Weiner

The trick of the internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real... which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all. ~ Jennifer Weiner

It's not what we believe that makes us happy but the act of believing. In anything. ~ Eric Weiner

Geniuses are always marginalized to one degree or another. Someone wholly invested in the status quo is unlikely to disrupt it. ~ Eric Weiner

I didn't trust people who forgot to eat. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into an all-out millennium alert. Watson and the White House counterterrorism group met around the clock. They sought an extraordinary number of FISA wiretaps; Janet Reno authorized at least one warrantless search on her own authority. Clarke ~ Tim Weiner

It takes 5 to 7 years to turn a novice into a case officer capable of working in the capitals of the world. ~ Tim Weiner

I can carry a tune with a three-note range. Once I'm out of that range, I'm in trouble. ~ Jennifer Weiner

F.E.A.R. Stood for face everything and recover ~ Jennifer Weiner

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing. ~ Matthew Weiner

A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change. ~ Eric Weiner

drawing of a boy with brown hair and ~ Jennifer Weiner

How, I wonder, staring out my hotel window into black nothingness, can Icelanders possibly be happy living under this veil of darkness? I've always associated happy places with palm trees and beaches and blue drinks and, of course, swim-up bars. That's paradise, right? The global travel industry certainly wants us to think so. Bliss, the ads tell us, lies someplace else, and that someplace else is sunny and eighty degrees. Always. Our language, too, reflects the palm-tree bias. Happy people have a sunny disposition and always look on the bright side of life. Unhappy people possess dark souls and black bile. ~ Eric Weiner

That's why we feel so disoriented, irritated even, when these touchstones from our past are altered. We don't like it when our hometown changes, even in small ways. It's unsettling. The playground! It used to be right here, I swear. Mess with our hometown, and you're messing with our past, with who we are. Nobody likes that. ~ Eric Weiner

The thing about bad decisions is that they don't feel like bad decisions when you're making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Depression, contrary to what we normally believe, is not sadness but an inability to fully feel sadness. Depression is sorrow denied. ~ Eric Weiner

It's a nice neighborhood, like the one I left. My home borough is Brooklyn and Queens. ~ Anthony Weiner

A remarkably large number of Renaissance artists were illegitimate, including Alberti and Ghiberti. For them, as for Leonardo, this was both a curse and a blessing. Had he been born "legitimately," Leonardo would likely have followed in his father's footsteps and become a notary or a lawyer. But those professions' guilds refused entry to illegitimate children. Leonardo couldn't become a doctor or a pharmacist, nor could he attend university. By age thirteen, most doors were already closed to him. ~ Éric Weiner

I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish. ~ Jennifer Weiner

I keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I've already been ~ Matthew Weiner

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention. ~ Jennifer Weiner

If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time. ~ Eric Weiner

Her Mother and Father were especially blind to feelings. Her Father denied he even had feelings and her Mother assumed everyone shared hers. Heather didn't know for years that her ability to see people's feelings and even feel them sometimes was unusual and when she discovered that the cruelty and rudeness that adults and friends inflicted on each other was unintentional or at least uninformed, she decided to withdraw, overwhelmed by the pain of typical human behavior. ~ Matthew Weiner

."The Swiss are uptight and happy. The Thais are laid-back and happy. Icelanders find joy in their binge drinking, Moldovans only misery. Maybe an Indian mind can digest these contradictions, but mine can't. ~ Eric Weiner

For the fifth year in a row, the Bush budget cuts city core services to pay for wealthy tax breaks. And once again, the mayor's requests were not funded. ~ Anthony Weiner

Long as people can still surprise you, it means you're not dead. ~ Jennifer Weiner

If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones. ~ Jennifer Weiner

So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed ... ~ Jennifer Weiner

Okay, I thought. Here you are. You are here. And you move forward because
that's the way it works; that's the only place u can go. You keep going
until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I
guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn't give us any choice. You grow up, I remembered Abigail telling me. You learn. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Cigarettes don't kill people - cancer kills people. ~ Richard M. Weiner

We live in a culture right now that pits girls against each other. We are brought up socially to be in competition with each other -who has the best body, more boyfriends, better clothes. And this kind of competition can be devastating on female friendships because it emphasizes a mentality that there isn't enough to go around, Enough love. Enough attention. Enough success. But there is . There is enough to share with your girlfriends. ~ Jessica Weiner

Brainstorming sounds like a great idea, but it doesn't work. Dozens of studies have demonstrated this conclusively. People produce more good ideas - twice as many - alone than they do together. One problem with brainstorming is ~ Eric Weiner

You're allowed to want to use your education. You're allowed to want to be more than a mother. ~ Jennifer Weiner

I've spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself. ~ Eric Weiner

I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren't looking; your husband could lose his job; our baby could get sick or die. ~ Jennifer Weiner

On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. "When I see those columns," he said, "I think of what happened to Greece and Rome." "They lost their will to live," he said. "They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period. ~ Tim Weiner

is the root cause of sorrow but desire is also the root cause of action. How do we counter the paralysis of action when there is no desire to motivate us? ~ Eric Weiner

The coffee shop played a big role in Vienna of 1900. Rents were sky high, housing was difficult to come by, your apartment probably wasn't heated, and so you went to the coffee shop. You went to the coffee shop because it was warm, because it was great Viennese coffee, and you went for the conversation and the company. ~ Eric Weiner

Perhaps it is not the belief of God that makes us happier but belief in something, anything. How else to explain the fact that the happiest countries in the world--Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands--are hardly religious at all? ~ Eric Weiner

It took seven years from the time I wrote Mad Men until it finally got on the screen. I lived every day with that script as if it were going to happen tomorrow. That's the faith you have to have. ~ Matthew Weiner

I'm not cut out to be a famous person; I can't do my hair and makeup well enough. ~ Jennifer Weiner

SHORTLY AFTER Louis Freeh was sworn in as the fifth director of the FBI on September 1, 1993, he turned in his White House pass. He refused to enter the Oval Office. His reasons were pure and simple. Freeh regarded President Clinton not as commander in chief but as the subject of a criminal case. The ~ Tim Weiner

I wanted love, the big love, the kind people wrote songs and made movies about. I wanted to be the center of some guy's universe, the only thing he could think about. I wanted to matter that way. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Congressmember Weiner has shown just a pattern of reckless behavior, an inability to tell the truth, and what New Yorkers deserve is a mayor with a record of delivering for them, of vision, and a level of maturity and responsibility. ~ Christine Quinn

We can't love a place or a person if we always have one foot out the door. ~ Eric Weiner

Humans, even nomadic ones, need a sense of home. Home need not be one place or any place at all, but every home has two essential elements: a sense of community and, even more important, a history. ~ Eric Weiner

You can be as good as Rembrandt, but if no one discovers you, you will only be a genius in theory. ~ Eric Weiner

I've learned a lot this year.. I learned that things don't always turn our the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I've learned that there are things that go wrong that don't always get fixed or get put back together the way they were before. I've learned that some broken things stay broken, and I've learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you. ~ Jennifer Weiner

It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game. ~ Jennifer Weiner

am late for my afternoon coffee with Linda Leaming, an American who has lived in Bhutan for the past nine years. Asia has attracted its share of spiritual seekers, or lama lickers as they're sometimes called, but Bhutan was closed to outsiders until the 1970s. Even after that, it was not an easy country to get to. You had to want it. ~ Eric Weiner

line. Creativity is a response to our environment. Greek painting was a response to the complex light (the Greek painter Apollodoros was the first to develop a technique for creating the illusion of depth), Greek architecture a response to the complex landscape, Greek philosophy a response to the complex, uncertain times. The problem with paradise is that it is perfect and therefore requires no response. This is why wealthy people and places often stagnate. Athens ~ Eric Weiner

The ghosts of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Botticelli and all the rest hang in the air, like San Francisco fog. You'd think it would have burned off by now, five hundred years later, but it hasn't. The half-life of true genius is inexhaustible. ~ Éric Weiner

Yet, whatever form it takes, the belief that individual freedom exists only when the state is frail misunderstands the source of liberty. The state can be more or less effective in the pursuit of its goals - it can be stupid or smart - and it can be used for illiberal, totalitarian ends. But ultimately a healthy state dedicated to the public interest makes individual freedom possible. This is the paradox of individualism. The individual freedom that citizens of liberal societies rightly cherish, even our very concept of the individual, is impossible without a robust state. Modern individualism depends on the existence of vigorous and effective government dedicated to the public interest, to policies that a majority of citizens would support without regard to their particular position in society at any given moment. It depends as well on the willingness of individual citizens to imagine themselves as members of a common public whose interests the state regularly vindicates. ~ Mark S. Weiner

The girl, Gary's girl ... would keep bowls of Hershey's Kisses on the coffee table, and she'd decorate the house for all the big holidays and most of the small ones. Probably she'd be class mother, and PTA president, and she'd deliver meals to the elderly once a month. In bed, she'd be exuberant, and would take it as an endorsement when Gary sweated all over her. ~ Jennifer Weiner

And remember-no woman ever said, on her deathbed, I wish I'd eaten less cake. ~ Jennifer Weiner

More and more Americans are asking about the price that we have to pay when Wal-Mart comes into a community, treats workers poorly, violates immigration laws and squashes small businesses. ~ Anthony Weiner

Once, she'd cried, telling me that she thought she should have noticed, should have seen that I was in trouble, should have done something. I told her it was my problem and my job to solve it. "Just be my friend," I said. "That's what I need most. ~ Jennifer Weiner

You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It's what biologists call "selective migration." ~ Eric Weiner

First of all, it's life. You don't win. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Just a regular gal, Jo thought, and smiled, thinking, If you only knew. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Paganism, it turns out, was the original Icelandic religion before a mass conversion in the year 1000. That was largely seen as a business decision, and Icelanders have never been particularly good Christians. They attend church if someone is born or wed or dies, but otherwise they are, as one Icelander put it, "atheists with good intentions. ~ Eric Weiner

There was a parallel universe that ran alongside the normal world, and if you went through the wrong door, or turned left instead of right, ran up the street instead of down it, you could accidentally push the curtain aside and end up in that other place, where everything was different and everything was wrong. That ~ Jennifer Weiner

Art history is fine. I mean, that's a discipline. Art history is art history, and you start from the beginning and you end up in artist in time. But art is a little bit different. Art is a conversation. And if there's no conversation, what the hell is it about? ~ Lawrence Weiner

I'm in the entertainment business, where you're only as good as your last show. ~ Matthew Weiner

felicity. It's simple math, though. Add up the pleasurable aspects of your life, then subtract the unpleasant ones. The result is your overall happiness. The same calculations, Bentham believed, could apply to an entire nation. Every action a government took, every law it passed, should be viewed through the "greatest happiness" prism. ~ Eric Weiner

Michael Savage (the pseudonym of Michael Alan Weiner) is another popular radio host whose syndicated radio program is followed by 8 to 10 million listeners. Like Limbaugh, Savage derided the detainees as "subhuman" and "vermin," and suggested that forcible conversion to Christianity is "probably the only thing that can turn them into human beings. ~ David Livingstone Smith

Hilmar owns many books, even by Icelandic standards. The other day, when he came home with a wheelbarrowful, his five-year-old daughter looked him in the eye and implored, "Please, Daddy, please, no more books!" Hilmar has a stock answer to those who criticize his excessive book buying. "It is never a waste of time to study how other people wasted time. ~ Eric Weiner

I would not have done anything differently. All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I am not saying that they were all good or that they happened for a reason...but they have been right. They have been okay. As far as revelations go its pretty lame, I know. Okay is not bliss or even happiness. Okay is not the basis for a new religion or self help movement. Okay won't get me on Oprah, but okay is a start and for that I am grateful. Can I thank Bhutan for this breakthrough? It's hard to say […] It is a strange place, peculiar in ways large and small. You lose your bearings here and when that happens a crack forms in your armor. A crack large enough, if you're lucky, to let in a few shafts of light. ~ Eric Weiner

You can't set a clock for yourself. If you do, you are not a writer. ~ Matthew Weiner

He was arguably the best-qualified FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover; he thought Clinton was the most talented politician since Richard Nixon. That made their mutual contempt all the more tragic. It undermined the FBI and ultimately damaged the United States. ~ Tim Weiner

The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition. ~ Tim Weiner

The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah," President Bush said at a Republican fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 9. "He's one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He's not plotting and planning anymore. He's where he belongs. ~ Tim Weiner

Sad to hear news about Michael Weiner, deepest condolences to his loved ones. His sacrifices as head of players union will not be forgotten. ~ Jose Bautista

Genitive is a funny word because it means "from," but it also is the gender in European languages for objects: the masculine, feminine, and neuter. So if you have a genitive present, there's room for everybody to fit in. I just did a project in Vienna about rock, paper, scissor; you change the gender and it simply changes the whole thing. Rock is no longer a male. It doesn't function the same way. ~ Lawrence Weiner

Worst of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: "The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation." That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system. Imagine if some doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna had declared: "The intention that Man should have a healthy body is not in the plan of Creation." We'd probably lock him up, or at least strip him of his medical license. We certainly wouldn't base our entire medical system on his ideas. Yet that is exactly what we did with Freud. ~ Eric Weiner

Matt Weiner is very perceptive; there's something about the rhythms and the way people speak that is very authentic to the actor. But there are qualities that are dissimilar. The characters on 'Mad Men' are struggling with pretty profound unhappiness, but I can tell you this is a happy bunch. ~ Aaron Staton

Have you ever considered that there might be something wrong with your brain?
Oh, I think there might be something wrong with everyone else's. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Skills come with age, but wisdom, I doubt it very, very much. ~ Lawrence Weiner

The self-help industrial complex hasn't helped. By telling us that happiness lives inside us, it's turned us inward just when we should be looking outward. Not to money but to other people, to community and to the kind of human bonds that so clearly are the sources of our happiness. ~ Eric Weiner

Managers will tell people what to do, whereas leaders will inspire them to do it, and there are a few things that go into the ability to inspire. ~ Jeff Weiner

What was going on? Brickman surmised that, in the case of the lottery winners, they now derived significantly less pleasure from ordinary events like buying clothes or talking to a friend. What was once enjoyable was no longer so. Psychologists call this the "hedonic treadmill." Much like a regular treadmill, the hedonic treadmill makes you sweat and should be avoided at all costs. Unlike a regular treadmill, however, the hedonic variety is definitely not good for your health. It will drive you nuts, this infinite cycle of pleasure and adaptation. Interestingly, there are two notable exceptions to the hedonic treadmill. Noise and big breasts. Studies have found that we never really get used to loud noises, despite prolonged exposure. Another study found that women who get breast implants never tire of the enjoyment it brings them, and presumably their companions feel the same. ~ Eric Weiner

Real giving is when we give to our spouses what's important to them, whether we understand it, like it, agree with it, or not. ~ Michele Weiner-Davis

Anthony Weiner deserves to be supported and hopefully he will be mayor of New York one day. I'm serious. He is a Democrat [who] actually fights for the things liberals and progressive and rational people care about. I don't know why he's being thrown under the bus. He hasn't done any - he hasn't broke any laws, ~ Janeane Garofalo

People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world ... But you have to do what's right for you. ~ Jennifer Weiner

The word "utopia" has two meanings. It means both "good place" and "nowhere". That's the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn't want to live in the perfect place, either. "A life time of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on earth," wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. ~ Eric Weiner

Still waters run deep, I'd thought. Later, I learned that silence did not necessarily guarantee depth. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life's difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness. ~ Eric Weiner

Face and figure from my dad's mother, Grandma Sadie, who was tall, ~ Jennifer Weiner

A writer wasn't a body, just a byline. My words would be sharp and spiky, punchy and pointed; my stories would be swift and lean, sleek and enviable, moving fast and hitting hard. I would not, I vowed, write like a fat girl. ~ Jennifer Weiner