Naim Quotes

#1. When I write in Hebrew, I don't look for sophistication in music; it's just pure emotion that comes out.

Yael Naim

#2. the world market for cheap labor exceeds even the market for cheap sex.

Moises Naim

#3. I like to sing covers of songs that are at the extreme ends from what I usually listen to.

Yael Naim

#4. My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.

Yael Naim

#5. The gap between our real power and what people expect from us is the source of the most difficult pressure any head of state has to manage.

Moises Naim

#6. New information technologies are tools - and to have an impact, tools need users, who in turn need goals, direction, and motivation.

Moises Naim

#7. I don't hide my being Israeli. I say it in every interview. I put out a record with songs in Hebrew. The people who signed me have no connection to Judaism or Israel.

Yael Naim

#8. Being from Israel and a Jew is complex already, but with France, there is a freedom and a mix of culture. I have met musicians from all over the world.

Yael Naim

#9. Power has a social function.

Moises Naim

#10. As always, I wrote songs. Some people cook or play sports. This is what I love to do. Sometimes I can't express myself that well in talk, so I write songs.

Yael Naim

#11. Songs are a way to express what I have felt. A way to understand what happened to me or to other people.

Yael Naim

#12. My first album was full of ideas and attempts to go in all kinds of directions. I was young. I loved making music, but I didn't have a clear path. I also lacked in confidence.

Yael Naim

#13. the decay of power has significantly altered the terms of global conflict.

Moises Naim

#14. Today, computers help us making the music. It's really a tool.

Yael Naim

#15. It's virtually an axiom that teamwork across divisions of a ministry or police force is complicated by rivalries, turf battles, and competing personal and institutional interests.

Moises Naim

#16. Power is spreading, and long-established, big players are increasingly being challenged by newer and smaller ones. And those who have power are more constrained in the ways they can use it.

Moises Naim

#17. I remember there was a little organ which I'd tap my fingers on all the time. My interest in the instrument was so obvious, one day I got home from school and there was a real piano in my bedroom.

Yael Naim

#18. I like finding that common point between another song and my music. It's like between people; you can be of religion or another, from this country or from another country, but we're all basically the same. It's just the same with songs.

Yael Naim

#19. power is easier to obtain and harder to use or even to keep.

Moises Naim

#20. Power is the ability to direct or privent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals.

Moises Naim

#21. We know that power is shifting from brawn to brains, from north to south and west to east, from old corporate behemoths to agile start-ups, from entrenched dictators to people in town squares and cyberspace.

Moises Naim

#22. I had arrived years ago in Paris and just wanted to be famous, fast. When you're pretentious like that, and you think you've planned everything perfectly, it's then that everything goes in the opposite way.

Yael Naim

#23. The decay of power also is one of the forces driving the profusion of myriad criminal, terrorist, or otherwise malevolent nonstate actors.

Moises Naim

#24. When people are more numerous and living fuller lives, they become more difficult to regiment and control.

Moises Naim

#25. English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.

Yael Naim

#26. the spread of consumer technology has given the traffickers a boost and helped them keep the edge over their pursuers.

Moises Naim

#27. For if nature abhors a vacuum, and greed is part of human nature, then greed too abhors a vacuum.

Moises Naim

#28. I thought I was an old soul, and that I knew life, but then starting the real life, I figured I am completely new.

Yael Naim

#29. Specifically it is about how power - the capacity to get others to do, or to stop doing, something - is undergoing a historic and world-changing transformation.

Moises Naim

#30. He believes the world has entered "an era of perpetual irregular warfare.

Moises Naim

#31. A world where players have enough power to block everyone else's initiatives but no one has the power to impose its preferred course of action is a world where decisions are not taken, taken too late, or watered down to the point of ineffectiveness. Without

Moises Naim

#32. Today, we ask not what we can do for our country but what our country, employer, fast-food purveyor, or favorite airline can do for us.

Moises Naim

#33. He who is active in politics strives for power, either as a means in serving other ends, ideal or egoistic, or as 'power for power's sake,' that is, in order to enjoy the prestige-feeling that power gives.

Moises Naim

#34. during transitions to democracy, nations often undergo political convulsions that make them hard to govern, thus feeding nostalgia for their old authoritarian order.

Moises Naim

#35. conversations each year with fellow participants confirmed my hunch: the powerful are experiencing increasingly greater limits on their power. The reactions to my probing always pointed in the same direction: power is becoming more feeble, transient, and constrained.

Moises Naim

#36. Usually when a song comes to me, I don't ask a lot of questions; I hear something, and I just let it out in song. It's like making a salad. Everything I hear, and everything I am, I mix together in a different way in each song.

Yael Naim

#37. In France, I found there is a lot of attention to the little details and to the quality of life.

Yael Naim

#38. The decay of power is changing the world.

Moises Naim

#39. In many Latin American countries, the historic ties of Catholic bishops with the political elite rendered them less sensitive to the conditions of the poor and especially of indigenous people.

Moises Naim