All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

The gods do not need sacrifices, so what might one do to please them? Acquire wisdom, it seems to me, and do all the good in one's power to those humans who deserve it.

If you were to offer a thirsty man all wisdom, you would not please him more than if you gave him a drink.

Please all, and you will please none.

The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.

You just have to trust your instincts and hope that if someone doesn't like your idea, you can prove them wrong in the final process. In the end, you can please some of the people some of the time, but that's about all you can do.

Will some reporter, or some Republican on the Sunday shows, please ask why tax cuts raid the non-existent Social Security Trust Fund but all the Democrats' new spending doesn't? Will someone please ask that?

If the response you finally receive from me is 'thanks but no thanks', then please accept at face value that I would really not be the right investor for you. You've got to trust me on this, and in this case take 'no' for an answer.

You might not trust me. Please give me a chance and time. I will prove myself for all of you.

Y'know, you can't please all the people all the time... and last night, all those people were at my show.

You can't please everyone. When you're too focused on living up to other people's standards, you aren't spending enough time raising your own. Some people may whisper, complain and judge. But for the most part, it's all in your head. People care less about your actions than you think. Why? They have their own problems!

Please stop teaching my children that everyone gets a trophy just for participating. What is this, the Nobel Prize? Not everybody gets a trophy.

I definitely want to continue working in independent films - and big budget stuff as well - but there's a freedom you have when you're not getting paid. It's easier to say no and there's no pressure to please the powers that be. Also I don't have to hear 'flirt and smile more.'

Of course I used to smile and laugh in 1976, but not when I was competing. Please show me somebody who laughs when they are concentrating; I always smiled.

I have always been a flirt. My mother says whe I was a child, I used to stand outside the house and just smile at everyone who walked by. Like, 'Please take me with you!'

I have learned to smile when I wasn't happy, to sing when I didn't feel like it, and to do things just to please my fans.

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.

Science is a perception of the world around us. Science is a place where what you find in nature pleases you.

Since my boyhood, I have sought always to please, but out of a kindness in me, never out of fear or respect for what was in others.

I think sports and bodybuilding were the only things that saved me from getting beat up. People are not pleased, for whatever reason, when you can answer all the questions in class. If not for the respect I got from track, cross-country, wrestling and bodybuilding, it would have been a disaster.

Each state, so that it does not abridge the great fundamental rights belonging, under the Constitution, to all citizens, may grant or withhold such civil rights as it pleases; all that is required is that, in this respect, its laws shall be impartial.

In school you teach us not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, to make your actions reflect your words.