These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.

Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.

And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world.

I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.

Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered.

Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.

At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.

There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.

A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.

At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.

Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.

These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.

Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.

I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.

You have to think with the heart.

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.

I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley.

For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

While we have made great progress in increasing funding for veterans' benefits, we still have a long way to go in fully meeting the promise to our veterans.

The promise of equal educational opportunity envisioned by the Brown decision remains unfulfilled.

It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.

The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to give it memory value.

How can you tell somebody whose is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?

To honor our national promise to our veterans, we must continue to improve services for our men and women in uniform today and provide long overdue benefits for the veterans and military retirees who have already served.

I think there is a good deal of promise in those discussions as well. I think there is a range of matters that might be discussed between NATO and Russia that can provide a mechanism for talking through these issues, a way to give reassurance on these issues.

You can't substitute promise after promise with known violators of prior promises at the expense of protecting ourselves or setting an example.

If you look closely enough, amid the merciless and the bitter, there is always the chance that you may find comfort and the promise of something good.

You give me nothing during your life, but you promise to provide for me at your death. If you are not a fool, you know what I wish for!

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.

I made a promise to myself to be kinder to other people.

Closing the gap for women entrepreneurs should be a priority for the federal government - and yet the Small Business Administration has failed in their promise to women business owners.

We're saying no changes for Medicare for people above the age of 55. And in order to keep the promise to current seniors who've already retired and organized their lives around this program, you have to reform it for the next generation.

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.

Truth is not a matter of fact but a state of harmony with progress and hope. Enveloped only in its wings will we ever soar to the promise of our greater selves.

The U.N. can be very frustrating and at times impotent, but it can also be a valuable forum for discussion and resolution of world problems. We should not walk away from it just because it's failed to live up to its promise.