Our alliances should be understood as a means to expand our influence, not as a constraint on our power. The expansion of democracy and freedom in the world should be a shared interest and value with all nations.
Chuck Hagel

One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray.
Tom Skerritt

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
Lionel Trilling

Gospel songs to me are about the mansion in the sky, and washed in the blood of Christ's crimson blood, songs that are filled with biblical wording that's no longer understood by a lot of people.
Larry Norman

I understood that the will could not be improved before the mind had been enlightened.
Johann Heinrich Lambert

If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be - not understood, but divined.
Remy de Gourmont

I believe that President Clinton considered the legal merits of the arguments for the pardon as he understood them, and he rendered his judgment, wise or unwise, on the merits.
John Podesta

I have never understood that. I come from a place where the press makes or breaks an actor and it is more of a teamwork relationship.
Michelle Trachtenberg

My father had left behind an old piano. My sister was already going to school, my mother was out working, and I stayed at home alone with my adorable grandmother who understood nothing I said. It was so boring that I stayed at the piano all day long, and that saved my life.
Michel Legrand

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
C. Day Lewis

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.
Brad Holland

I have never understood the Iowa caucus.
Larry King

How man evolved with such an incredible reservoir of talent and such fantastic diversity isn't completely understood... he knows so little and has nothing to measure himself against.
Edward T. Hall

There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.
Peter Weir

I understood once I held a baby in my arms, why some people have the need to keep having them.
Spalding Gray

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.
Roman Jakobson

I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.
Whitfield Diffie

In Goddess religion death is not feared, but is understood to be a part of life, followed by birth and renewal.
Carol P. Christ

The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.
Werner Heisenberg

Equality and development will not be achieved however if peace is not understood from women's' point of view.
Jenny Shipley