Quotes by Journalists - Page 100

Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.

... I hadn't been paying attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.

And when you are being kissed like this, you are Christmas Day; you are the moon shot; you are field larks. My shoes were suddenly worth a million pounds, and my breath was the ethyl in champagne. When someone kisses you like this, you are the point of everything.

And there, until 1884, it was possible to gaze on the remains of a generally neglected monument, so-called Dagobert’s Tower, which included a ninth-century staircase set into the masonry, of which the thirty-foot handrail was fashioned out of the trunk of a gigantic oak tree. Here, according to tradition, lived a barber and a pastry-cook, who in the year 1335 plied their trade next door to each other. The reputation of the pastry-cook, whose products were among the most delicious that could be found, grew day by day. Members of the high-ranking clergy in particular were very fond of the extraordinary meat pies that, on the grounds of keeping to himself the secret of how the meats were seasoned, our man made all on his own, with the sole assistance of an apprentice who was responsible for the pastry.His neighbor the barber had won favor with the public through his honesty, his skilled hairdressing and shaving, and the steam baths he offered. Now, thanks to a dog that insistently scratched at the ground in a certain place, the ghastly origins of the meat used by the pastry-cook became known, for the animal unearthed some human bones! It was established that every Saturday before shutting up shop the barber would offer to shave a foreign student for free. He would put the unsuspecting young man in a tip-back seat and then cut his throat. The victim was immediately rushed down to the cellar, where the pastry-cook took delivery of him, cut him up, and added the requisite seasoning. For which the pies were famed, ‘especially as human flesh is more delicate because of the diet,’ old Dubreuil comments facetiously.The two wretched fellows were burned with their pies, the house was ordered to be demolished, and in its place was built a kind of expiatory pyramid, with the figure of the dog on one of its faces. The pyramid was there until 1861.But this is where the story takes another turn and joins the very best of black comedy. For the considerable number of ecclesiastics who had unwittingly consumed human flesh were not only guilty before God of the very venial sin of greed; they were automatically excommunicated! A grand council was held under the aegis of several bishops and it was decided to send to Avignon, where Pope Clement VI resided, a delegation of prelates with a view to securing the rescindment if not of the Christian interdiction against cannibalism then at least of the torments of hell that faced the inadvertent cannibals. The delegation set off, with a tidy sum of money, bare-footed, bearing candles and singing psalms. But the roads of that time were not very safe and doubtless strewn with temptation. Anyway, the fact is that Clement VI never saw any sign of the penitents, and with good reason.

Now, consider this.　　A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.

...being with you was so easy and natural - there was no strain - I never had to guard my words...

My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won’t be reversed: by now the Jonathan’s as much an American as I am.

It doesn't follow that the riots mean permanent hostility toward him.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.

Viciousness is part of the world we live in, some of us choose to ignore it with the rationalisation of wanting only positivity to flow our way. How selfish we have become! That the pain of others has become a hindrance to the fulfilment of our positive selves.

Halloween creatures both friendly & gruesome peered out of the rustling leaves.

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

--and yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again.

The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.

What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.

I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults — librarians, friends’ parents — suggest to me that I liked books “with magic” because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face.

During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid wants to be.

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

I did not know what she suffered from, but I knew that her malady must have been horrible; I knew that from the way she used to embrace me.

Creativity is always a leap of faith. Writers sit down in front of empty pages. Painters stare before blank easels. Thespians rehearse looking toward empty stages. Creativity is experimental by nature.

No one sits, as you do, so close to a king, who does not begin to grasp how the levers of power work, and the cost of the oil that must grease them.

you are a ring tone on the phone I didn’t answer

He was the first prime minister in a long time who did not have a son or a son-in-law in business or real estate

She was a pixie, a fairy, full of imagination and in another world.

With the single exception of the American Revolution, the aftermath of all revolutions from 1789 on only worsened the human condition.

The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society]The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it.p171-172The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. But the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims.Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade.He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood.In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky.p172-173

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.

Jason smiled. The sound of wings was louder now, the fluttering of angels come to carry him home.

God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.

the more different you and I are, the less we will be able to identify with each other, and the more difficult it will to understand each other. If we can't see ourselves in another person at all—if his beliefs and background and reactions and emotions conflict too radically with our own—we often just withdraw the assumption that he is like us in any important way. That kind of dehumanization generally leads nowhere good.

My handsome husband and I didn’t make love for almost six months. I was enraptured, lost to my old life, and, in this obsession, disregarded author Ayelet Waldman – who famously wrote of her 'smug well-being' and 'always vital, even torrid' sex life in the wake of childbirth: I ignored my husband as a man. Instead, I revelled in him as a different thing altogether, far more seductive and important, and infinitely more resonant. My husband was no longer just a man: he was the father of my child.

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

If I loved you for no reasons I will hate you for more reasons

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.

The stutter remains something memorable and good. I felt more at ease because of it. We were both somewhat vulnerable and, in our own ways, hesitant.

Why does it seem easier for us to accept reality when it is within the confinement of the animal kingdom yet so hard for us to face it in our?

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

We have to learn to remind the other parents who think we're being careless when we loosen our grip that we are actually trying to teach our children how to get along in the world, and that we believe this is our job. A child who can fend for himself is a lot safer than one forever coddled, because the coddled child will not have Mom or Dad around all the time, even though they act as if he will.

To live in books is cowardly---but people are not worth investigation.

In the minds of their peers, too often students become caricatures of themselves.

Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

Kind eyes under all the mascara.

The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too.

Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve.

Excerpt from page 113[On Malaysia's Prime Minster's anti-capitalism and anti-globalization policies in September 1997] "Ah, excuse me, Mahathir, but what planet are you living on? You talk about participating in globalization as if it were a choice you had. Globalization isn't a choice. It's a reality. There is just one global market today, and the only way you can grown at the speed your people want to grow is by tapping into the global stock and bond markets, by seeking out multinationals to invest in your country and by selling into the global trading systems what your factories produce. And the most basic truth about globalization is: No one is in charge. You keep looking for someone to complain to, someone to take the heat off your markets, someone to blame. Well, guess what, Mahathir, there's no one on the other end of the phone!""The Electronic Heard cuts no one any slack... The herd is not infallible. It makes mistakes too. It overreacts and it overshoots. But if your fundamentals are basically sound, the herd will eventually recognize this and come back. They herd is never stupid for too long. In the end, it always responds to good governance and good economic management.

The unfortunate reality is that, even today, too many citizens have reason to fear that their right to vote, their access to the ballot--and their ability to have their votes counted--is under threat." --Eric Holder, quoted in Give Us the Ballot

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

Did she make you laugh? Did she love you as much as you loved her? Did she protect you and warm you and keep you from suffering? Valentine turned her eyes away from him, unable to face the empty answer in his face but not wanting to stop saying what she had thought for so long. "I saw how fascinating her mystery was to you. For my part, I think that the mystery is always greatest where there is the most-emptiness. A person full of life is never mysterious, on the contrary.

I realize that humans cannot bear very much reality. Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad'Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him!

A very focused Chinese government, with firm, long-term social and economic goals, and an increasingly assertive international voice, is feeling more pressure from the Chinese dreamers, and is putting more pressure on foreign business interests. The foreign multinationals have their purposes, but also feed resentment that so much of China’s hard work results in easy profits for foreign brands and foreign shareholders. This new reality requires foreign firms to pay much more attention to the social context, and to ensure that they can manage the increased political and regulatory risk. From "Risky Business in China" (Palgrave, September 2014)

No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.

The world knows nothing of you. That is my gift to you. You are no one.

...you listen first with the ears - then, you wait and listen for what your heart feels - then you consider what they've said - then, you reply ...

Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.

Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.

There’s no easier way to cure foolishness than to give a man leave to be foolish. And the only way to show a fellow that he’s chosen the wrong business is to let him try it.

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.