Clint Eastwood Sayings And Quotes

They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.

Grandma has a .45 long barrel that she keeps hidden from my mother. She got it from her friend Elsie, who picked it up at a yard sale. Probably it was in Grandma's purse. Grandma says it gives the bag some heft, in case she has to beat off a mugger. This might be true, but I think mostly Grandma likes pretending she is Clint Eastwood.

Many, many things had to be done before the movie actually was made. The most important was finding a director. We had no say in that, but it was fun to fantasize. One night when we were in the kitchen, I looked over at Chris and asked, “Who would you want directing the movie?” “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Wouldn’t Clint Eastwood be fantastic?” “Hell, yes,” he said. In truth, everything was fantasy: many books are optioned but few become movies, so we couldn’t even be sure there would be a movie. Given that we had no control over it, we turned our attention to other things.

Companies don't want anyone telling them how to deal with their workers  -- they never have; they never will. Stores don't want anyone telling them how to design their entrances; how many steps they can have (or can't have); how heavy their doors can be. Yet they accept their city's building and fire codes, dictating to them how many people they can have in their restaurants, based on square footage, so that the place will not be a fire hazard. They accept that the city can inspect their electrical wiring to ensure that it "meets code" before they open for business. Yet they chafe if an individual wants an accommodation. Because, it seems, it is seen as "special for the handicapped," most of whom likely don't deserve it. Accommodation is fought doubly hard when it is seen to be a way of letting "the disabled" have a part of what we believe is for "normal" people. Although no access code, anywhere, requires them, automatic doors remain the one thing, besides flat or ramped entrances, that one hears about most from people with mobility problems: they need automatic doors as well as flat entrances. Yet no code, anywhere, includes them; mandating them would be "going too far"; giving the disabled more than they have a right to. A ramp is OK. An automatic door? That isn't reasonable. At least that's what the building lobby says. Few disability rights groups, anywhere, have tried to push for that accommodation. Some wheelchair activists are now pressing for "basic, minimal access" in all new single-family housing, so, they say, they can visit friends and attend gatherings in others' homes. This means at least one flat entrance and a bathroom they can get into. De-medicalization No large grocery or hotel firm, no home-and-garden discount supply center would consider designing an entrance that did not include automatic doors. They are standard in hotels and discount warehouses. Not, of course, for the people who literally can not open doors by themselves  -- for such people are "the disabled": them, not us. Firms that operate hotels, groceries and building supply stores fight regulations that require they accommodate "the disabled." Automatic doors that go in uncomplainingly are meant for us, the fit, the nondisabled, to ensure that we will continue to shop at the grocery or building supply center; to make it easy for us to get our grocery carts out, our lumber dollies to our truck loaded with Sheetrock for the weekend project. So the bellhops can get the luggage in and out of the hotel easily. When it is for "them," it is resisted; when it is for "us," however, it is seen as a design improvement. Same item; different purpose

Those who made excuses for Jerry Lewis didn't recognize disability bigotry when they saw it, insisted attorney Harriet Johnson, who had one of the diseases Jerry was curing. "When bigotry is part of mainstream culture, it feels like ‘the way things are.'" My grandfather's generation of white men in the South didn't recognize sexism. They thought women really were magnolia blossoms requiring protection. They didn't recognize racism either. They thought African Americans really were inherently inferior, suitable to menial work, and that the structures of segregation were for the good of both races. They'd say it wasn't prejudice, but the way things are. This is where we are with disability today. Lewis says he uses pity because, hey, we're pitiful. And people agree. If you don't see the profound animus in Jerry Lewis's statement, try substituting the minority group. What if he said, "If you don't want to be bashed for being gay, stay in your house"? Or, "If you don't want to be groped for being a broad, stay in your house"? Or  -- if you believe the "charity" work excuses hate  -- consider this scenario. What if the United Negro College Fund hired a white comedian to raise money from white people, using bigotry. "Give because they're so stupid, so hopelessly ignorant, they need their own schools to keep them out of our schools." Would the success of such a pitch justify it? Or would we recognize that the more it succeeds  -- the more people buy into it  -- the more harm it does? I think  -- I hope  -- we're at a point now where people would be up in arms if one of those other minority groups were treated with such profound disrespect, for decades, by a charity ostensibly dedicated to "helping" them. But with disability, it's a lesson yet to be learned.

To be regarded as "disabled" in the U.S. is to experience powerlessness on all kinds of levels  -- physical, psychological, political. To be considered disabled is to be put in a supplicant position, the position of the "patient," told to be quiet; if you need something, to ask kindly for it. These are the strictures of disability's Jim Crow. It is really about power: disabled people are considered powerless. Anyone with any savvy is sure to tell others that they don't consider themselves disabled. President Roosevelt called himself a "cured cripple" for that very reason. "If I am talking with a person fairly ignorant of disability rights, and I want to impress upon them that we are legion, I will say, ‘Thirty to 45 percent of the population of this country is disabled,'" professor David Pfeiffer says. "That is a way of getting to the discussion of ‘what is disability'  -- so they will realize that everyone is, or will be, disabled. "But ‘disability' is an ideological term. To name a person as ‘disabled' is to give them an inferior position. In our society people identified as disabled are second-class, third-class, or even worse-class citizens. We live in a constant state of discrimination. Identifying oneself or another person as a ‘person with a disability' is an ideological act. There is no other way to describe it." Which is why not everyone with a functional difference will identify as disabled, he says. Being disabled "is a damning thing.

Yet laws had been passed, again and again, requiring access  -- full access. New York City and New York state, and California, had some of the strictest access laws in the nation. But often such laws were seen as "feel good" measures. "Disability policy, I've never known any partisan debate on it," Sen. Tom Harkin would say later. Legislators knew their laws would be honored only in the breach, and so it was fine to have them  -- it showed no one was against the handicapped.

No one is against the handicapped" is why disability rights has had so little hearing in this country. The phrase says that there is no animus against disabled people  -- even though they are segregated and kept from full access to society, even though the special programs society affords them make for a much circumscribed life  -- far more circumscribed than what any nondisabled citizen would settle for (we will see this in Chapter 13). The purpose of the phrase is to stifle dissent,

The non-handicapped majority says, in effect, "we will extend to you provisional and partial toleration of your public presence  -- as long as you display a continuous, cheerful striving toward ‘normalization.'" "Cheerful" was the key word here, Longmore pointed out. Disabled people couldn't complain, couldn't whimper, and certainly couldn't protest or sue. That wasn't part of the bargain. One could see this bargain's negotiations in progress whenever one observed an interaction between a disabled person and the larger society. It had much in common with the way relationships were conducted in the Jim Crow South. Disabled people who accepted their part of the bargain  -- and the vast majority did  -- went along with society's image of how they were supposed to act.

Institutionalization and ‘special housing' At the time of the passage of the ADA, states still had laws on the books requiring people with mental disabilities to be institutionalized. Not even slaves had been so restricted. "Spurred by the eugenics movement," write legal historians Morton Horwitz, Martha Field and Martha Minow, "every state in the country passed laws that singled out people with mental or physical disabilities for institutionalization." The laws made it clear that the state's purpose was not to benefit disabled people but to segregate them from "normal" society. Thus, statutes noted that the disabled were segregated and institutionalized for being a "menace to society" [and] so that "society [might be] relieved from the heavy economic and moral losses arising from the existence at large of these unfortunate persons." "The state of Washington made it a crime for a parent to refuse state-ordered institutionalization," they wrote; "once children were institutionalized, many state laws required parents to waive all custody rights." Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in the 1985 Cleburne Supreme Court decision (the decision saying that people with mental retardation did not constitute a "discrete and insular" minority) that this "regime of state-mandated segregation and degradation [had] in its virulence and bigotry rivaled, and indeed paralleled, the worst excesses of Jim Crow. Massive custodial institutions were built to warehouse the retarded for life." Yet they continue today. In 1999, the Supreme Court in its Olmstead decision acknowledged that the ADA did in fact require states to provide services to people with disabilities in the "most integrated setting"; but institutionalization continued, because federal funds  -- Medicaid, mostly  -- had a built-in "institutional bias," the result of savvy lobbying over the years by owners of institutions like nursing homes: In no state could one be denied a "bed" in a nursing home, but in only a few states could one use those same Medicaid dollars to get services in one's home that were usually much less expensive. Ongoing battles were waged to close down the institutions, to allow the people in them to live on their own or in small group settings. But parents often fought to keep them open. When they did close, other special facilities cropped up.

Or recall a time in your own past when you stood up to a bully. If you know people who know how to handle your Tank, imagine being those people and thinking or feeling whatever it is they feel or think that allows them to be more effective. Identify models of people who have the self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-control to deal calmly and professionally with pushy people. For example, imagine what it would feel like to be Clint Eastwood, saying, “Go ahead. Make my day.” Whichever of these methods you use, make it a mental habit to rehearse dealing with your Tank at least a few times, until you feel comfortable with the prospect of using it.

{T}here hung that mirror still. Splotches like mold or something had collected from the corners toward the middle, but Brown was able to see enough of himself in it to feel a fair amount of disgust. No more than the usual amount. He scratched at his chin growth. Did a rat eat your razors? That's what his daddy would say. He wished his chin jutted out more like Clint Eastwood or James Dean or whotheheckever. Instead, you could barely see his chin, it hid so far back against his neck.

An elegant Italian woman, worldly, sophisticated. Francesca. At the end of World War II, she meets and marries an American soldier, moves with him to his small Iowan farm town of good people who bring carrot cakes to their neighbors, look after the elderly, and ostracize those who flout norms by, say, committing adultery. Her husband is kind, devoted, and limited. She loves her children. One day her family leaves town for a week, to show their pigs at a state fair. She's alone in the farmhouse for the first time in her married life. She relishes her solitude. Until a photographer fro National Geographic knocks on the door, asking directions to a nearby landmark... and they fall into a passionate, four-day affair. He begs her to run away with him; she packs her bags. Until, at the last minute, she unpacks them. Partly because she's married, and she has children, and the town's eyes are on them all. But also because she knows that she and the photographer have already taken each other to the perfect and beautiful world. And that now it's time to descend to the actual one. If they try to live in that other world for good, it will recede into the distance; it will be as if they'd never been there at all. She says goodbye, and they long for each other for the rest of their lives. Yet Francesca is quietly sustained by their encounter, the photographer creatively renewed. On his deathbed years later, he sends her a book of images he made, commemorating their four days together. If this story sounds familiar , it's because it comes from The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 novel by Robert James Waller that sold more than twelve million copies, and a 1995 movie, starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, that grossed $182 million. The press attributed its popularity to a rash of women trapped in unhappy marriages and pining for handsome photographers. But that's not what the story was really about. In the frenzy after the book came out, there were two camps: one that loved it because the couple's love was pure and endured over the decades. The other camp saw this as a copout--that real love is working through challenges of an actual relationship. Which was right?

Regarding Clint’s methods (as a director), he was a very impatient man who doesn’t really plan his pictures or do any homework, truthfully. He figures he can go right in and sail right through these things. Clint was just as impatient as an actor, especially in an action picture when directing himself. For example, Clint was always blowing his lines. It’s very hard for him to say more than four lines consecutively. And no matter if Clint forgot his lines, he would insist that the camera pick up the dialogue just where he had left off, without going back and starting the lines over. It was the cameraman’s problem to choose different angles and make the pickups, or transitions, work. Notorious for doing his acting scenes with multiple pickups, Clint had an ironclad belief that everything could be fixed in the editing room. Nobody among his fans would notice the incongruities.