Quotes by Journalists - Page 135

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.more than a rounding error.
Elizabeth Kolbert
Nothing awakens the conscience like a lot of money.
P.Sainath
An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything, and in this lies the great distinction between great man and little man.- Thomas Fuller
Bryan Curtis
Labor is sacrificed on the inflation rates altar of oblation.
Richard Gwynn
An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.
Howard Jacobson
I had enough of a story churning in my head that combined all the elements of the day—the interview, the concert, the after-party’s private session—when he put his guitar away and asked me if I had ever experimented with homosexuality. Talk about unexpected segues. Letting him know that I had not and wasn’t about to, I successfully changed the subject by asking him to give me a condensed account about traveling to Mississippi in search of Bukka White.
Kenny Weissberg
When art as an expression starts to appear, without prompting, all over the suburbs and villages of this country, what we are saying is: we are confident enough to create our own living, our own entertainment, our own aesthetic. Such an aesthetic will not be donated to us from the corridors of a university; or from the Ministry of Culture, or by the French Cultural Centre. It will come from the individual creations of a thousand creative people
Binyavanga Wainaina
If you don't enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends then the chances are you're not going to be happy. If someone bases his happiness or unhappiness on major events like a great new job huge amounts of money a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris that person isn't going to be happy much of the time. If on the other hand happiness depends on a good breakfast flowers in the yard a drink or a nap then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness.
Andy Rooney
I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you're not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
Jon Ronson
In being able to learn from his mistakes and grow, Eisenhower "was transformed from a mere person into a personage.
Lynne Olson
When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.
George Orwell
To do more, is not necessarily to do better.
Katy Butler
Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.
Michael Finkel
If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.
James Surowiecki
Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Church says: the body is a sin.Science says: the body is a machine.Advertising says: The body is a business.The Body says: I am a fiesta.
Eduardo Galeano
I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.
Joan Didion
There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....
Thomas Frank
A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says thinks or does is without consequences.
Norman Cousins
I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went.
Richard Engel
The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television.
Eric Burns
The answer to these questions is tied to the public's attitude about suicide. For many people, suicide is morally reprehensible. It's against their religion, or against their culture, or contrary to their personal values. Like other unpleasant subjects - incest, disease, discrimination - it's avoided.
John Bateson
A millenarian fire burned in Oppenheimer’s spirit, fueled by his pride as a world-historical individual, by his fear that the natural force he loosed upon the world would escape all human control, and by a pure-hearted longing to ensure that his discovery of the devastation latent in the elemental substance of the world would serve concord rather than the ultimate discord, perpetual peace rather than permanent self-destruction.
Algis Valiunas
We are at the tail end of a decline in infant mortality that began just over a century ago. Babies no longer wander into open hearths or are mauled by marauding pigs. We have vaccines, lead-free educational toys, diapers that can sop up a typhoon. But we have never been more worried.
Nicholas Day
I killed a couple of people,” Scooter said. “Wanna play cards?
Forrest Carr
Comprehending and knowing better and deeper are the best guarantees we can have to attain ideas and criteria of our own; i.e. to stop depending on what other people say. In summary, to be freer to choose our own path in life.
Manuel Toharia-Cortés
With Zia's controversial demise in 1988, Jinnah was finally spared the false beard Zia kept pinning on the founder's otherwise clean-shaven face.
Nadeem Farooq Paracha
I figure I'll win the fight in twenty years or so anyways when I end up with a decent life and their unemployed and living at home.
Alexandra Robbins
Deep sadness is an artist of powers that affects people in different ways. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, shocking all the emotions to a sharper life. To another, it comes as the blow of a crushing strike.
Ambrose Bierce
No love no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.
François Mauriac
It is one thing to be brave in front of others, perhaps for fear of being branded a coward and becoming diminished in their eyes, but another entirely to be brave when there is nobody to witness your courage. The latter is an elemental bravery, a strength of spirit and character.
John Connolly
Just as well then that kings did not grow old.
Edoardo Albert
If there was a party, everyone in turn would come sit next to me to regale me with how he or sh thought I should live and what I deserved to have. What it boiled down to was that I should live like them. Elvire, one half of a tightly knit couple would forget that her husband was clinically depressed. Guillaume, married to a harpy, maintained that if one laid low and said amen to everything, things worked out. Maria, fed up to the teeth with her children, wanted me to have my own. Assia loved women but it was killing her mother. Patrizio had bruises on his shoulders from his chronically jealous wife. Not one of them could stand my singleness, because it could have been theirs.
Sophie Fontanel
In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.
Lev Grossman
Christmas makes me schmaltzy. I'm proud to be level-headed, even a little tough most of the time. But once a year I like to believe that peace on earth may be possible and calories don't count.
Sue Merrell
I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.
Winston Groom
And the hunger that once chewed at them like a mean dog now seems more like an annoying houseguest who simply refuses to leave.
Dave Boling
Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Ruth Rendell
Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power – until he bore executive responsibility.
Jon Meacham
For instance, a fireman is a brave fellow! He fears nothing, least ofall fire! Well, the fireman in question, who had gone to make a roundof inspection in the cellars and who, it seems, had ventured a littlefarther than usual, suddenly reappeared on the stage, pale, scared,trembling, with his eyes starting out of his head, and practicallyfainted in the arms of the proud mother of little Jammes.[1] And why?Because he had seen coming toward him, AT THE LEVEL OF HIS HEAD, BUTWITHOUT A BODY ATTACHED TO IT, A HEAD OF FIRE! And, as I said, afireman is not afraid of fire.The fireman's name was Pampin.
Gaston Leroux
... I told him I was so happy that I had nothing else to pray for. 'Why,'says I, I've got prayers to sell.
Sandra Dallas
Failure has its successes.
Brian Howard
Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it.
Albert Camus
What’s more insane? Hearing imaginary voices? Or not hearing the real ones?
Forrest Carr
Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other’s secrets.
Katherine Boo
There are two things that grant a bit of immortality: books and children
Tiziano Terzani
I grew up in libraries, and I hope I've learned never to take them for granted. A thriving library is the heart of its community, providing access to information and educational opportunities, bringing people together, leveling the playing field, and archiving our history.
Josie Brown
Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.
Rebecca McKinsey
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell
...careful the morning lest it wake from slumber the city half-encumbered by the morning mist ...
John Geddes
Delay is as dangerous as the wrong answer.
Frank Herbert
The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage, like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. (Dark City Lights)
Tom Callahan
Guns are not the problem. The species is the problem.
Forrest Carr
It's clear that politeness to one's elders can't always be justified on the basis of the elder's superior wisdom. It's just that it's not attractive to see a young person answering an older person back.
Zoë Heller
The man who is intent on making the most of his opportunities is too busy to bother about luck.
B.C. Forbes
If it doesn't agree with your spirit let it go.
Germany Kent
You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn't much time left.
Stieg Larsson
Her breasts and arms ached with the beauty of her own forgiveness.
Meridel Le Sueur
But if they have a flashlight, it means they're human and not some kind of monsters from the surface,' objected Artyom."I don't know what's worse," said Melnik, cutting off Artyom.
Dmitry Glukhovsky
You can make a text mean anything, especially if it’s old and full of ambiguities.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte