Circus Quotes - Page 12

• Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business!

  Paddy Chayefsky

  Football, Player, Boredom

  "The Screenplays: The Hospital; Network; Altered states".

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• Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Boredom, Office, Long

  Tom Hodgkinson (2011). “Brave Old World: A Month-by-Month Guide to Husbandry, or the Fine Art of Looking After Yourself”, p.16, Penguin UK

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• It is a truism, of course, that in "democratic" states the populace must be encouraged to imagine that it makes important decisions by voting, and must therefore be controlled by suitable propaganda, which implants ideas to which the voters respond as automatically as trained animals respond to words of command in a circus, thus leaving to the masses only a factitious choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the basis of their preference for a certain kind of oratory, a hair-style, or a particular facial expression.

  Revilo P. Oliver

  Animal, Expression, Ideas

  "Revised Historiography". "Liberty Bell" Magazine, April 1980.

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• Whenever the circus would come to town, I would tell Ethan all kinds of kinky clown domination stories involving the leather clown, like the time she forced me to have sex with her in the little car, or the time she kept spraying me with the seltzer bottle until I obeyed her every command. Ethan and I would laugh and laugh at these tall tales, but I could tell deep down, he was wondering whether the leather clown was really real or not. And I would let him wonder.

  John S. Hall

  Sex, Real, Laughing

  "Song: 'Leather Clown' ('They')". 1988.

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• The bit I love is I really love acting, really, and the circus of being a celebrity is something I'm sort of not interested in. I find it strange.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Love Is, Acting, Strange

  "Tom Hiddleston Talks THE AVENGERS Aftermath, the Darker Tone, His Ownership of the Character, and More on the Set of THOR: THE DARK WORLD". Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. October 1, 2013.

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• People would be in hysterics if they saw that. It's like, wow, he's a superhuman moron.... So he wears lipstick, has a little bouffant, and does little circus acts as well. Oh, he's so sexy.

  Robert Pattinson

  Funny, Sexy, People

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• I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

  Winston Churchill

  Children, Taken, Eye

  Speech in House of Commons, 28 Jan. 1931

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• When I was younger, I wanted to own a circus and create this bizarre revue that went from town to town. And, I was interested in set design and doing theater. And then, I was painting for a while. It was all circling around creating an intense experience for an audience of one, or an audience of many.

  Neil Burger

  Creating, Audience Of One, Design

  Source: collider.com

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• Recently I stood in the desert, far out side of L. A., and watched the sun set on a circus tent from 1930. Every where stood animals: elephants, tigers that should be loaded into a steam train. 300 extras in costumes raced around, the modern world had disappeared totally. Although that was totally fake, it still happened directly before my eyes! That was my perfect day. I would be gladly experience that every day. It happens continually to me: It calls itself work. That is wonderful and more than enough.

  Robert Pattinson

  Eye, Animal, Perfect Days

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• Under Lenin the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the U.S. Post Office.

  Jimmy Carter

  Religious, War, Office

  Jimmy Carter (2013). “Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President”, p.229, University of Arkansas Press

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• When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a baseball player and also join the circus. With the Yankees, I've accomplished both.

  Graig Nettles

  Baseball, Boys, Player

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• All dance has expression. If there is no expression, I prefer the circus. The performers do more dangerous, more difficult technical things than we do. But we are dancers. We have to express and we have to project.

  Luis de la Fuente

  Dance, Expression, Dancing

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• Here I am, your one man circus freak show, having bled out for mother Russia, having desperately tried to get to you, now on top of you with this scourge marks, and you, who used to love me, who was sympathized, internalized, normalized everything, you are not allowed to turn away from me....this is what I am going to look like until the day I die. I can't get any peace from you ever unless you find away to make peace with this. Make peace with me. Or let me go for good.

  Paullina Simons

  Mother, Men, Russia

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• I read the Romans had bread and circuses. We had home relief and boxing.

  Jake LaMotta

  Home, Boxing, Relief

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• People speak of the fear of the blank canvas as though it is a temporary hesitation, a trembling moment of self-doubt. For me it was more like being abducted from my bed by a clown, thrust into a circus arena with a wicker chair, and told to tame a pissed-off lion in front of an expectant crowd.

  Hannah Kent

  Self, People, Doubt

  Hannah Kent (2013). “Burial Rites”, p.234, Pan Macmillan

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• Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

  Gore Vidal

  Party, Wings, Two

  Gore Vidal (2004). “Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia”, p.50, CLAIRVIEW BOOKS

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• There is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars. I have heard the expression “trick of the light” applied to sights within Le Cirque des Reves so frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion of illumination” .

  Erin Morgenstern

  Stars, Light, Sight

  Erin Morgenstern (2016). “The Night Circus”, p.95, Random House

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• We must educate the public. The average person has no idea of what's going on in factory farms, in laboratories, circuses, roadside zoos or rodeos.

  Bob Barker

  Zoos, Average, Ideas

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• My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.

  Ben Aaronovitch

  Dad, People, Immigration

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• You're not going to be able to look like anyone else, no matter how hard you try, unless you're a mimic, then you're not acting, you're just mimicking. You can't go on being John Wayne, that's John Wayne. So you're not going to steal from John Wayne. I'm not going to steal from John Wayne and you're not going to come back and say 'Didn't you get that from the circus?' You know. But he is one of those people who instructs me, whom I look up to - whom I think is one of the masters of his craft that I am so enamoured of.

  Morgan Freeman

  Thinking, People, Trying

  "Morgan Freeman - part two". Guardian interview, www.theguardian.com. July 14, 2000.

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• Through PETA, we rescue animals in roadside zoos and circuses. They are some of the most abused animals in the country.

  Sam Simon

  Country, Zoos, Animal

  "Terminally Ill 'Simpsons' Co-Creator Vows to Give Away Fortune". Interview with Gary Baum, www.hollywoodreporter.com. July 25, 2013.

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• For the last six or seven years the circus has no longer been in fashion. That is a pity. One should go to the circus, beyond any question of fashion, at least one or two times a year-I am not speaking here to the real enthusiasts, they know better than I what they have to do.

  Adrienne Monnier

  Fashion, Real, Years

  Adrienne Monnier (1976). “The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier”, p.237, U of Nebraska Press

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• Hello, my sister, Libby, also your daughter, is snogging a potato in my bed. What are you going to do about it?' Dad started yelling uncontrollably. I wonder if he is having the male menopause? If he starts growing breasts, I will definitely be running away with the Circus.

  Louise Rennison

  Daughter, Running, Dad

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• I never went to acting school. I started in the circus, music hall, I was in a group, did kids bits. Ive always had this kind of insecurity being uneducated.

  Rupert Graves

  School, Kids, Insecurity

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Well, I had an immense respect for Cirque du Soleil when I first say them in the '80s on a television show and just thought, you know, this group is really reinventing the circus, as you know. Because there wasn't three rings. There were no animals.

  Criss Angel

  Animal, Firsts, Groups

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