Alexander Payne
Alexander Payne

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

Anthea Butler
Anthea Butler

Gun rights advocates - many whom also believe that the US constitution is divinely inspired and that the rights it enumerates are God-given - face a conundrum. Their very insistence that the government not restrict guns in public spaces or limit their sales in any way also obviously inhibit other Americans' rights as covered by the US constitution.

Arthur Erickson
Arthur Erickson

Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms.

Ban Ki-moon
Ban Ki-moon

I have been, and will remain, outspoken in my insistence that Israel has a right to live in peace and security.

Ben Kingsley
Ben Kingsley

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders

At the insistence of the Bush administration, Congress in 2006 passed legislation that required the Postal Service to prefund, over a 10-year period, 75 years of future retiree health benefits.

Cass Sunstein
Cass Sunstein

What unites Sanders, McCarthy, McGovern and Reagan is the unmistakable clarity of their moral convictions, their tendency to outrage, and their insistence that the United States needs to embark on a whole new path.

Conrad Wolfram
Conrad Wolfram

Maths is fundamentally a different process in education than it is in the real world. There is an insistence that we do maths by hand when most of it is done by computers. The idea that you have to do everything by hand before you can operate a computer is nonsense.

Craig Mazin
Craig Mazin

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

Daniel Burnham
Daniel Burnham

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.