Basically Quotations

'Bloom' is basically the idea that all flesh is grass, and that we can look at natural plant growth and organic material as outgrowths of the Earth.

The first seven years of my life, me, my mom and dad and my four older siblings lived in a suburb of Stockholm, and my mom was very active with directing theater. So I basically grew up at the theater on the floors of the shows, so I was really surrounded with music at a young age.

President Obama has basically avoided or not done any attempt to intervene in any positive way in the housing market. I think in the financial crisis that's been a shame.

I basically have a very positive philosophy of life, because I don't feel I have anything to lose. Most things are going to turn out okay.

I stopped thinking about it after trying to figure out what are the lessons learned, and there are so many. After I had basically sorted that out, I figured it's time to really look at the future and not at the past.

All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.

Basically I say a few prayers before a game and let that direct me, not superstitions.

In my own case, I'm an artist, and I'm really interested in expanding the vocabulary of human action, and basically empowering people through interactivity. I want people to discover themselves as actors, as creative actors, by having interactive experiences.

I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we'd vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.

The only way I see the world now is through coming out of and growing up and living in Somalia. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all - it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras.

My character in 'Fresh Meat' is quite prim and tidy, and then I basically had no make-up for the whole shoot of 'Kidnap and Ransom' - apart from a bit of Vaseline to make me look even sweatier!

You basically have a group of four spies who are chosen for a mission they feel for the fact of how competent they are and how their expertise and they're the right one for the job. But ultimately they find out they've been actually chosen for their incompetence.

My father was one of the first Tae Kwon Do Masters to come to the states in the '60s. He had one of the first all-African-American fighting teams, and I was basically raised in a karate studio since I was 3. It's part of my blood, competing, and all that stuff was responsible for a lot of me just growing up.

I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way.

When my marriage broke up... I had just put on 45 pounds for my 'Shall We Dance?' character. I had to eat 10,000 calories a day just to put on weight while training with Tony Dovolani. I basically stayed in bed for a six-month rotation of depression naps. Dance helped me lose the weight.

When you walk away from God, and you walk away from Christ, you're basically uprooting the very foundations of being. So I don't think there is an easy way to do that. Even for the guy who becomes an atheist out of it, it's messy. It ain't pretty.

We're all kind of basically involved in the same thing, putting up a blank of some kind and filling it in.

Basically I am a private individual who has concerns about his country and who has resources that give me the privilege - and responsibility - to do something to help my country if I can.

Women, the way I see it, are very evolved people. They're more mature, they're more aware of their feelings, in touch with their feelings. They're connected to things that matter more in life. They know what's important. Men basically run around like idiots until we meet somebody who can show us that those things are important.

At most schools, if you switch majors, you basically start over. That means more semesters... and more money. The former might be appealing, but the latter is a major problem for a demographic already saddled with student debt.

Basically it's the core story. About a guy having an affair with the mother of the girl he falls in love with.

I'm a Sagittarius, born in the year of the rat, all of which is basically meaningless to me.

I'm from Berkeley, California, so I'm fully trained in socialism and all, but basically what they teach you there is markets are efficient and we can't beat them, so we might as well index.

Romantic ideas about the heart fly in the face of known fact, but that doesn't matter and never has. People many thousands of years ago knew that the heart is basically a blood pump, but that didn't keep them from also believing it was the seat of romantic love (and all other strong emotion).

I basically try to visualize the team doing good things on the court the night before the game. I get shots up. There's not actually a pregame ritual that I do. I'm still trying to figure that out. I say a prayer. I go out with confidence.

When you home study, you get a better education. I basically got to teach myself. Being naturally able to make my own opinions about the schoolwork I had to deal with, instead of being instructed under the tutelage of the teacher, was really nice academically.

I'm not trying to change an image, I'm just trying to make sure that the facts match the image. The facts are basically that I'm a builder. I have not dissembled any company nor split up any companies, nor do I ever buy any companies with that intent.

New platforms are emerging: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Xbox. And film actors are gravitating towards television, because there are basically better roles there. Television is making the kind of epics and genres that the movie studios used to make, and often doing it better with more complex narratives and corresponding budgets.

Ryan Murphy, he basically tries to find something that's a pulse, a pressure point in our culture, and he grabs it, and he squeezes it. I think 'Freak Show' has a lot to do with the entertainment industry and the way we entertain ourselves: the objectification of people and the lengths we'll go for our own amusement.

What has been adjudicated and established in the wake of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement is the ability of the press to basically write or broadcast almost anything about the government. There's very few restrictions in that way.

I didn't really take a lot of any on-camera classes or anything like that. I really just threw all of my energy into auditioning, and I know that I basically just did things based on feedback that I would get.

I basically was in charge of the Jackson 5 - all their creative, when it came down to the studio, and all their musical endeavors.

As an Egyptian, I was always frustrated, just like many young Egyptians, of the situation in the country. And to a large extent, we didn't know what could we do. And looking at Khaled's photo after his death; basically I just felt that we are all Khaled Said.

For me, the fall of the Wall came at the exact right time because, I mean, I was 17, basically I hadn't missed anything, unlike the generation of my parents, who were deprived of a lot of things. They couldn't travel, and they couldn't really get ahead in their professional careers. So for me, it was perfect timing.

Neither, I must say with all due respect, is it the power of teachers and students. Basically the true and real power is with working people of all colors, of all beliefs, of all national origins.

I thought I might like to farm. But I didn't know the economics of it. Teachers basically steered me away from it.

I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.

They basically said that if I didn't show up for school they'd mark me present, they wouldn't send the truant officer after me. At 16 I enrolled in something called continuing education. Once a month I'd go out to Jamaica, but I didn't take it seriously.

I can't think of any NBA team over the last few years that lost three starters. And we replaced them basically with three guys who really haven't played in this league.

Redemption basically is about holistic health, if you want to translate it into modern parlance. What I suggest - based on the Christian tradition but not often preached - is that you can't enter into the fullness of the Pascal mystery of the redemption unless there is a radical transformation of motivation within you.

My mum is, like, my biggest fan, and she's the one who will basically do all the publicity for me back home... She'll constantly be talking to me saying, 'Dan, what's going on? We've heard this. Tell us about it! Dad wants to know!' And so I'll give them as much information as I can, and Mom and Dad are both my biggest fans.

There's definitely a whole different vibe on the set when there's like basically royalty working with us. We could have whatever we wanted. I felt like Britney Spears.

The human race survived the Inquisition. We can survive. It's like the Anne Frank quote: 'In spite of everything, I still believe that people are basically good at heart.' Given what happened to her, it's one of the miracles of the world that she said that.

Venice has always fascinated me. Every country in Europe then was run by kings and the Vatican except Venice, which was basically run by councils. I've always wondered why.

Giving birth was the most amazing thing I've ever done. I'd been living in a Third World country, and I said, 'I'm going to just squat behind a tree.' I basically did that but in a chair in my living room. I didn't want a sterile hospital room. I didn't want doctors. I had a midwife.

I became passionate about nature filmmaking when I graduated from UCLA, and one of the things I always wanted to do was shoot really high quality film, so I got into time-lapse photography - so that means when you shoot a flower, you're shooting, like, one frame every twenty minutes, so that's basically two seconds of a film per day.

I was basically a dork that hit the books and liked to build things and did all of the things that you weren't supposed to do to be popular. But somehow I ended up onstage, playing guitar in front of everybody else.

It's kind of a language I've developed over time that's basically breaking up the face into components and planes. Inside each plane, I draw gradation marks, and when planes come together, they form sinews, a hairlike weave that's like a landscape of the face.

Corporations are like countries now, there's a king, there are serfs, there's a court, basically everything but moats. They're feudal societies, and there are good ones and bad ones.

When I auditioned for 'Jessie,' I knew that Disney Channel basically will do 100 episodes of a show if it's a hit; they'll stick with something. It's a great network to work with because they make a nice big commitment to a show.

When you have a diagnosis of cancer, or any serious illness, your choices are basically to be passive and kind of accept whatever is offered you, or to be active and to learn about your disease, and understand your options, and be an active partner with your doctor. That's the course I took with all three of my cancers.

It's a very naive idea to think that the chef is cooking everything, and, on top of it, is irreplaceable. That would mean that basically he is the only genius, and there are idiots all around him, which doesn't make sense.

Certain formats should never be forgotten, 'Blind Date' for instance, because 'Britain's Got Talent' is really 'New Faces' or 'The Gong Show,' whilst we're basically 'Opportunity Knocks.'

The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.

'Jaws' was the ultimate man vs. nature movie, and it was a movie that was basically three people against the elements, so that was the biggest influence on 'Frozen.'

I vividly remember my first 'Superman' comic, which my granddad bought me when I was about 7. From that point on, all I wanted to do is draw comics. And specifically, superhero and science fiction comics. Basically I used to copy comic books, and draw my own comics on scrap paper.

I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.

Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.

When I heard that the bees were in trouble, the fact that they're disappearing and not coming back to the hive, which is a big issue, since a third of the food we eat comes from plants, I figured you couldn't tell the story of the bees without the story of the flowers and how they basically have evolved together for over 150 years.

It's difficult to make your clients understand that there are certain days that the market will go up or down 2%, and it's basically driven by algorithms talking to algorithms. There's no real rhyme or reason for that. So it's difficult. We just try to preach long-term investing and staying the course.

It basically comes down to that word: Love. I guess that's what it's all about.

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

In AirAsia, we consider ourselves basically a dream factory. We deliberately decided that we wanted a company where people can pursue their passion, and we wanted to make use of all the talent that we have in-house.

Sharks are really serious animals. They've been around longer than dinosaurs. They're basically prehistoric killing machines, and that's terrifying and fascinating, at the same time.

I basically use Facebook and Twitter and MySpace to communicate with the fans. I don't think it's necessarily about advancing my career, but I do want to be able to connect with my fans. They are so important to me, and a lot of them have stuck with me since the very beginning, and that means so much to me.

It's easier for me to write certain character types because of my own life experiences, but I find it too artistically limiting to only write about red-headed kids who grew up in small town Montana. That's really part of the fun of fantasy, I think. Our imagination is basically unlimited. Okay, that's a terrifying thing about fantasy, too.

I had been working on this series called 'Everything Dies,' and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics.

There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.

Basically I'm a female human being with brown hair, enjoy precision, reading the news, eating delicious food with my delicious friends and laughing at ridiculous things that don't translate while you are desperately trying to make them.

The stance I took was there is no room for racial bias anywhere in sports. I believe that was basically all I said about it. Certainly I was cast as an abolitionist. Death threats came. Hate mail came.

Music is such a great communicator. It breaks down linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, it basically reaches out. That's when rock n' roll succeeds, and that's what virtuosity is all about.

I go to this gym in Hollywood: it's a Cross Fit gym. It's basically just a really high intensity, sort of, athletic movements. I'm sure Cross Fit is going to be mad at me for not giving their definition of what Cross Fit is.

I basically say I'm on tour all the time, because one tour goes into the next.

There aren't many people who say that Europe is a territory, or Asia is a territory - it'd be suicide. And there are even more people in America than in Europe. I think it's strange, really. I basically see it as loads of different places.

Honestly, acting is the most work when you're unemployed. For me, the actual acting part is never hard. It's the politics and basically everything around the acting that is difficult.

A picture of me as this super affable sales guy gets painted, but in actuality, I'm pretty driven by hard work and love working with teams. What people discount is, I grew up in a very small blue-collar town in Massachusetts and have basically scrapped my way career wise.

Politics and sports are the same thing in some ways. I like sports; I don't like the sports aspect of politics. The conventions are basically the playoffs, and the election's the Super Bowl. To me, it doesn't feel important.

I'm basically different things to different people. If it's a guy, I'm-a probably have my guard up because it's a street rule that when men come around that I don't know, I just immediately throw shade on them. But I don't associate with fellas all that much; if it's a girl - a beautiful girl - I be nice.

I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.

I'm a fun-loving guy. We are basically from Amritsar and ours is a chilled-out family. I think I have got my humour from my mother.

I have thought you could not give everything to your books and also to your children, so for a long time, I thought if I had a child or a family, I'd think, 'How would I support them?' because basically I would stop writing.

Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct.

Growing up, I was always creatively inclined, and when YouTube came about, it was like getting the perfect platform to showcase what I wanted. Personally, I was going through a dark phase in my life, and I decided to make videos and basically go by the adage, 'If you want to cheer up yourself, go cheer up someone else.'

It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that's basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you're really stuck with them in some sense. You can't return them to the wild.

Oswald is an interesting character. Disney lost the rights to him in 1928 to Universal, who was distributing the cartoons and basically handed him over to Walter Lantz.

Well, everybody knew their character. I was the only one who didn't have a partner. I basically showed up when people got in trouble. Where I came from, I don't know. Nobody knows. But I would show up to help.

The Hulk is not basically violent, but only reacts violently when a threat is perceived. He has a certain passion for life. He is drawn towards kids and animals and the downtrodden.

I don't know about the hair. I've had it since I was a kid, and when I look at myself in the mirror, it looks quite normal. But then when I look at myself in a photo, I realise that my hair is basically bigger than my head! There's quite a lot of interest in my hair, which is strange, as for me, it's normal!

I have a lot of influences. I like to sit down with the cinematographer a month before, and we'll watch pieces of 20 or 30 movies. You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

I wouldn't discount the possibility that the Israelis would act if they came to the conclusion that basically the world was prepared to live with Iran with nuclear weapons. They certainly have the capability by themselves to set back the Iranian nuclear program.

I mean, when I got to Brown, the place was riven, because you had older professors who were basically new critics and had been teaching a certain way for 30 years. And then you had this other gang who was down with the semiotic program. And as a student, you were, in a way, forced to choose which cohort you were going with.

A sketch should be about two to three minutes, which is basically what most songs are. They're usually done by groups. Good examples of each build and have different parts and twists in them. I guess sketch would be the comedy version of music.

I went to high school, and I started getting bullied because I was very weird. I mean, freshman year I went to school in a pirate suit - I just didn't care. I'm not like the cool girls - I'm the other girl. The one that's basically a nerd, but proud of that.

We're going to move from a commodity economy where you basically grow the same kind of crops - where a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn - to an ingredient economy where there will be a kernel of corn that will be designed for fuel, there will be a kernel of corn designed for livestock.

There are two 'Snow White' movies coming out for the same reason that you remember back in the day there was 'Armageddon' and then 'Deep Impact.' You know, 'Andromeda Strain' and then 'Outbreak.' Like, all of those things. It's common because basically studios have no imagination in making the decisions.

'Billionaire' is basically about, you know, like 'Brewster's Millions.' It's me talking about what would happen if I would somehow manage to become a billionaire. What would I do with the money? Don't get it wrong, I'm far from a billionaire. I think I just made it out the 'thousandaire' category.

Let's be clear: Neither Secretary Powell or I opposed the notion of removing Saddam Hussein by force, but we wanted to avoid the war if we could. But if we couldn't, the notion of removing Saddam Hussein from the scene seemed eminently sensible, given that you had, what, 16 or so U.N. Security Council resolutions basically saying the same thing.

This almost never happens, but what is really relaxing is just being in this house all by myself, sitting quietly and watching TV. But I basically never get that chance.

Aside from being bad sportsmanship - Romney basically said Obama won by cheating - he was displaying the same obtuseness about the wants and needs of ordinary people that did more to torpedo his campaign than any goodies Obama might have had to dole out.

It just comes down to taste at the end of the day, and that's something you can't really analyze. Yeah, I think to have it all there is basically best, regardless of whether there's hiss there as well.