David Friedman Quotations

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

As time goes by, I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself.

As a person, I'm not that hopeful, but somehow the hopeful part of me reveals itself through my songs.

Corn ethanol can help in the short term, but it has serious limitations, and none of this is going to work if we don't dramatically improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

I know a lot of people who have tremendous commercial success and they go directly for it. There's something that has always been difficult about that for me.

I've written several deeply personal songs this year, which I really love. Some of them came out of intense sadness. This has been an extremely difficult year for me.

My first career was as a coach and a teacher.

I wanted to produce Nancy LaMott's albums, so I created my own record company.

I write and direct the Duke University Children's Hospital Benefit every year.

My career keeps shifting; I keep doing the next thing and it keeps growing.

Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there.

There is no seam between my songs and myself-they really are me. It's not like I'm performing; I'm just singing stuff that I really believe.

When I got to Broadway, I conducted five Broadway shows.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

Composition is definitely what I'm born to do, and it came last.

I don't like to produce albums. I hate producing albums, as a matter of fact, because I'm an obsessed mixer and I can't leave it alone.

I fought for years and spent a fortune fighting and never got anywhere.

I think of my songs as there to be something to move people emotionally.

I'm not comfortable singing in front of people yet. That's going to take another 100 performances.

I'm trying to have everything that I put into the world be something that makes a difference in the way I want to make a difference.

I've been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there.

It sometimes feels like I'm not doing anything.

For Hunchback, we needed this live, gigantic choir. So we went to London and said, This is Disney! I need singers who can sing high D's, hold them for 18 seconds, and do it 60 times!

I've been doing a lot of studying singing, and I'm thinking of recording an album containing all my old war horses and putting out a songbook at the same time.

I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.

I was talking to my spiritual advisor. I got a letter from somebody who said that they were about to kill themselves, but they listened to a song of mine and it saved their lives.

No one could have imagined 30 years ago that vehicles categorized as trucks would be the most common passenger vehicles on the road today. It's amazing what the auto companies can do. They have found lots of innovative ways of meeting the letter, but beating the spirit, of regulations.

He was in constant pursuit of new challenges. He chose to be a passing quarterback when a pass was used in desperation.

People no longer seem shocked by expressions of overt bigotry,

It expresses very clearly where the university stands on this.

We believe this is a first, having online video game champions playing live while a mile-high above the earth.

We've listened closely and are making changes that provide added flexibility at price points more favorable to our customers.

There is clearly not going to be a reconciliation here, and she has every reason and right to want to go on with her life,

When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.

This will be a real test about how serious he is about ending this addiction.

What on earth is an optometrist from Massachusetts doing on this stage?

With gasoline prices expected to approach $3 per gallon or higher, drivers are going to need this kind of help.

We were in good shape when we opened at the Prince, since we had done numerous workshops and done the show in Westport several years before, but having the audience there allowed us to tweak several areas where we had several choices as to how to do things, ... There will certainly be more tweaks and there were a few ideas we never got the chance to implement at the Prince which we can't wait to try. Also, because of budgetary reasons, the Prince essentially utilized half the planned set, so we're excited about doing the show with the full set.

And yet we got nothing in these final rules, nothing in the way of improvements on the miniscule change in fuel-economy standards proposed in August. Nothing to reduce our dependence on oil or to address high fuel costs.

After the Bush administration acknowledged our oil addiction, one might have expected a slam dunk, but this is an air ball.

As our service has expanded to more airlines and destinations worldwide, passengers have enjoyed the benefits of airborne Internet access. Yet, through our customer research, passengers also have told us they want simplified pricing based on the time they are connected and more options for how to pay for it. We've listened closely and are making changes that provide added flexibility at price points more favorable to our customers.

Few auto makers have bothered to combine these things yet.

ethanol has great potential to help the U.S. kick our oil habit, but that's 20 or 30 years away.

Ethanol, hydrogen, electricity - it is going to take 20 or 30 years for them to have a major impact, and consumers need help today. Even if we are successful with ethanol, we can't kick our oil habit unless we move to fuel economy.

I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world, but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that.

I'm not totally altruistic. I've always had great career ambitions. But it has to come out in an organic way. If you push yourself out beyond where you are supposed to be, there's this pressure.

I'm not surprised that they would attempt to create a false veneer of legitimacy by promoting their cause through the mouths of Jews and Israelis. It doesn't matter who is speaking; what matters is the content of the message, and that message of an analogy between South African apartheid and Zionism is false and extreme.

Not in my wildest dreams did I think I would be on this stage.

I publish my own music. I'm creating my own songbook. It works that way for me; I'm very independent.

The industry has exploded. Arizona businesses have been very active in demanding this service.

This is more of the Bill Ford that we expected to see and have been hoping to see, ... But you've got to take some concrete steps, too.

For Benny, it was not about him; it was about family, friends and teamwork. He was proud, yet unpretentious.

It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.

It's so irresponsible to use that kind of imagery, in many ways it becomes meaningless. It really obscures and confuses rather than helps.

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations