Commentary Quotes

• To stay in the game, you have to stay in the game.

  Michael Owen

  Games

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• When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.

  Dennis Ritchie

  Thinking, Giving, Advice

  "The future according to Dennis Ritchie". Interview with Danny Kalev, sites.fas.harvard.edu. December 4, 2000.

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• You witness the artists acting as witnesses, but they provide a point of view that's less monolithic. It's less official in a certain way. Many artists are speaking in the first person singular, as a reaction to dubbed-over media commentary. The thought is: "Enough with how we're represented by the media. Let me tell the story."

  Massimiliano Gioni

  Artist, Views, Media

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.

  John Shirley

  Writing, Thinking, Social

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• Of course I do things in my voice in my commentary, which I wrote.

  Werner Herzog

  Voice, Courses

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beautiful, Artist, Significant Things

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.222, Penguin

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• To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.

  Robert Kirkman

  Character, Zombie, World

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• No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Sometimes

  Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Deadeye Dick”, Delacorte Press

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• Music is always a commentary on society.

  Frank Zappa

  Music, Music Is

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• I read the text; and then I come to the Shirat ha-Yam, to the Song of the Sea [Exodus 15], to the poetry. Who could have written such a poem except someone who went through it? It is so full of life, so full of truth, of passion, of concern. And the thousands and thousands of commentaries in the Talmudic tradition that have been written on it. It had to have happened. But even if not, I would attribute the same beauty to the text as I do now.

  Elie Wiesel

  Song, Passion, Yams

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• One day - I remember it was a Sabbath afternoon - I came to the synagogue with a book in my hand. I saw a commentary on the Bible by a certain Rabbi Moshe Dessauer, better known as Moses Mendelssohn. An elderly man came up to me - I was then maybe 10 or 12. "What are you studying?" he said. "Dessauer's commentaries," I said. So he gave me a slap on my face.

  Elie Wiesel

  Book, Men, Elderly

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• At the end [when I speak about] magma under us everywhere, how it's monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, recoiled reptiles, and vapid humans alike. You see, you would never hear anything like that in a National Geographic or a PBS movie. This is clearly a transgression when it comes to being politically correct with your commentary.

  Werner Herzog

  Pbs, Vapid, Roaches

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Character

  Fernando Pessoa, Iain Watson (1991). “The book of disquiet: a selection”, Quartet Encounters

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• The jokes were perfect! Then George Carlin started talking about the seven dirty words you can't say on television, then it evolved into social commentary.

  Jay Mohr

  Dirty, Talking, Perfect

  Source: underthegunreview.net

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• I believe myself to be a worthwhile and inventive performer in my own right. But I'm not in a league with Lenny [Bruce], certainly not in terms of social commentary.

  George Carlin

  Believe, League, Social

  Source: reprints.longform.org

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• I don't do the running commentary as the movie's playing. I think you should be able to watch the movie without listening to me talk while the movies playing.

  Steven Spielberg

  Running, Thinking, Listening

  Interview with Steve Head, www.ign.com. December 17, 2002.

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• I see therapy as a substitute for friendship. I see it as a commentary on the impersonality of society that people have to pay someone to tell them their troubles.

  Jon Winokur

  People, Pay, Trouble

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• I like doing commentary. As a filmmaker and film student, I think it's really interesting to hear what a director did and how they figured out how to do things. I often like the technical commentaries myself.

  Catherine Hardwicke

  Thinking, Interesting, Directors

  Source: collider.com

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• The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commentaries of individual lives, and they gain an added mystery in each new revelation.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Heart, Gains, Mystery

  Rabindranath Tagore (2016). “SĀDHANĀ - The Realisation of life”, p.3, Rabindranath Tagore

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• The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• Ayn Rand held that art is a 're-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements.' By its nature, therefore, a novel (like a statue or a symphony) does not require or tolerate an explanatory preface; it is a self-contained universe, aloof from commentary, beckoning the reader to enter, perceive, respond.

  Leonard Peikoff

  Art, Reality, Self

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• [On the New Testament:] I ... must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the men who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the men who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we [women] are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have.

  Sarah Moore Grimke

  Bible, Reading, Writing

  Sarah Moore Grimké, Mary S. Parker (1838). “Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker”, p.16

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• Trent Lott has regained a position of leadership. He was the former majority leader who lost his post for racially insensitive commentary. I believe he mentioned that Strom Thurmond in 1948, who ran as a segregationist candidate, should have won. ... But now, sound the irony alarm. He has recaptured a position and his position -- I kid you not -- in the Senate will be minority whip. So, my guess is he takes to that job like, let's say, white on rice.

  Jon Stewart

  Jobs, Believe, Kids

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• Of all the commentaries on the Scriptures, good examples are the best.

  John Donne

  Example, Scripture, Good Examples

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• I don't do commentaries on films because A) I'm not very good at it and B) it's an odd thing that I discovered, on my first film, that you go through this really intense experience of making a film and then you sit in a little room with a monitor and you reduce the thing to a bunch of silly anecdotes. It's really unfulfilling and I've never really enjoyed listening to them anyway, so I just don't do them.

  David Slade

  Silly, Listening, Rooms

  Source: collider.com

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