Quotes by Journalists - Page 137

I began to realize that maybe my opinions just didn’t fit in with the liberal status quo, which seems to mean that you must absolutely hate Trump, his supporters and everything they believe. If you dare not to protest or boycott Trump, you are a traitor.If you dare to question liberal stances or make an effort toward understanding why conservatives think the way they do, you are a traitor. It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore.
Chadwick Moore
Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need nod exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism.That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though the Post was the second news organization to obtain a copy of the secret study of the Vietnam war, Bradlee noted that 'there was blood on every word' of the Times' initial stories. Bradlee could convey his opinions with a single disgusted glance at an indolent reporter or editor.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein
If you ask me what I came to do in this world I an artist I will answer you: T am here to live out loud.'
Émile Zola
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occa
Albert Camus
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Albert Camus
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don't say anything because we're frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
Mitch Albom
We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.
Michael Pollan
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.
William Lloyd Garrison
The very best thing about landing in that grave? Perspective.So I peer through this morning's prism: a science test looming in second period, an a-hole of a coach who probably could have used more childhood therapy than I got, and a tell-tale tampon under my foot.I consider the clawed tiger on the bed, the one wearing the zebra-printed sports bra - the same tiger that every Sunday transforms into the girl who voluntarily walks next door to help sort Miss Effie's medicine into her days-of-the-week pill container. The one who pretended her ankle hurt one day last week so the backup settler on her volleyball team would get to play on her birthday.
Julia Heaberlin
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
George Orwell
Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone.
Ambrose Bierce
In this messianic vision, machine intelligence will come to redeem the universe of its incalculable stupidity. He takes a goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind of corporate project-management structure, composed of a series of key deliverables across deep time.
Mark O'Connell
... there's a silent voice in the wilderness that we hear only when no one else is around. When you go far, far beyond, out across the netherlands of the Known, the din of human static slowly fades away, over and out.
Rob Schultheis
Here dwell together still two men of noteWho never lived and so can never die:How very near they seem, yet how remoteThat age before the world went all awry.But still the game’s afoot for those with earsAttuned to catch the distant view-halloo:England is England yet, for all our fears–Only those things the heart believes are true.A yellow fog swirls past the window-paneAs night descends upon this fabled street:A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.Here, though the world explode, these two survive,And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
Vincent Starrett
Buffett does enjoy being a billionaire, but in offbeat ways. As he put it, though money cannot change your health or how many people love you, it lets you be in 'more interesting environments.
Roger Lowenstein
Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.' The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.
Naomi Wolf
Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life.
Émile Zola
A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.
Frank Herbert
Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out.
Gayle Forman
America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable
Hunter S. Thompson
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.
Dame Rebecca West
It was not very long afterwards that Michael woke up one morning with a curious feeling inside him. He knew, the moment he opened his eyes, that something was wrong but he was not quite sure what it was. "What is today, Mary Poppins?" He enquired, pushing the bedclothes away from him. "Tuesday," said Mary Poppins. "Go and turn on your bath. Hurry!" she said, as he made no effort to move. He turned over and pulled the bedclothes up over his head and the curious feeling increased. "What did I say?" said Mary Poppins in that cold, clear voice that was always a Warning. Michael knew now what was happening to him. He knew he was going to be naughty.
P.L. Travers
Imagine what it must be like for teenagers who don't feel they have room to breathe in their own homes. If you are a parent reading this book, you care about your child. If she is quirky, unusual, or nonconformist, ask yourself whether you are doing everything you can to nurture her unusual interests, style, or skills, or whether instead you are directly or subtly pushing her to hide them.
Alexandra Robbins
I think it is important for our society to wonder why it has lately become so ready to accept that human woe can be cured or soothed by chemicals. These chemicals do not alter or reform the ills of our civilisation. They adapt the human being to them.
Peter Hitchens
In modern politics, even the leader of the free world needs help from the sultan of Facebookistan.
Rebecca MacKinnon
It turns out that knowing how loved we are by God makes all the difference in the kind of people we will become.
Jonathan Martin
There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York." (on Tom Wolfe)
Norman Mailer
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
H.L. Mencken
I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection.
Natalie Angier
He won’t stop the war until you give him the peace prize.
Mohammed Hanif
A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
George Orwell
I used to think this was all about good and evil,” said Rickett, “but it’s not.”“No?”“There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.”“And while we’re alive?”“We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.” He patted Parker on the shoulder. “Especially the destroying ones.
John Connolly
You can feel the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain-- no matter how smart or accomplished--they cry, they yearn, they hurt. But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should have been looking, too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: comfort, love and a peaceful heart.
Mitch Albom
Experience has taught me the power of trophies. You may have every knick-knack and useless contraption ever devised, but while they weigh you down, a simple trophy can go a long, long way.
Tahir Shah
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. I Corinthians xiii (adapted)
George Orwell
It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.
Ian Fleming
Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just
Michela Wrong
I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.
Boris Johnson
I’ve had many enemies over the years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s never engage in a fight you’re sure to lose. On the other hand, never let anyone who has insulted you get away with it. Bide your time and strike back when you’re in a position of strength—even if you no longer need to strike back.
Stieg Larsson
For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick.
Christopher Hitchens
Racism is not merely about individual chauvinism, prejudice, or bigotry. Ruth Glimore reminds us that it is about the ways different groups are 'vulnerable to premature death,' whether at the hands of the state or structures that kill.
Jeff Chang
To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
Jane Jacobs
Taste” is a noun and a verb: We all have it and we all do it. But we don’t all have a language or a system for understanding and expressing that experience… I knew chocolate was something I didn’t want to lose, but I didn’t have the words to communicate why it was so important to me, or the knowledge on how best to save it. Now I do.
Simran Sethi
Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right here: in his soil, in his plants, even in himself...But wildness is more a quality than a place, and though humans can't manufacture it, they can nourish and husband it...The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.
Michael Pollan
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P.J. O'Rourke
Humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix.
Richard Brookhiser
The ribboned gallons that rule us like beliefs rooted in single experiences.
Cameron Conaway
For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him... A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.
George Orwell
Researchers began finding that habit replacement worked pretty well for many people until the stresses of life—such as finding out your mom has cancer, or your marriage is coming apart—got too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon. Academics asked why, if habit replacement is so effective, it seemed to fail at such critical moments. And as they dug into alcoholics’ stories to answer that question, they learned that replacement habits only become durable new behaviors when they are accompanied by something else.One group of researchers at the Alcohol Research Group in California, for instance, noticed a pattern in interviews. Over and over again, alcoholics said the same thing: Identifying cues and choosing new routines is important, but without another ingredient, the new habits never fully took hold.The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.
Charles Duhigg
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion
You can't undo loss. You can't unmake a mistake. (What The Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth?)
Gayle Forman
It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how we wants to grow, how he can become different, how he might become more of what he is capable of being.
Thomas Gordon
Yvette is a woman who looks like a church bell. Her copper body curves with purpose, angles on a chair as if from a tower overlooking a village by the sea. Her bones are strong everywhere, in her cheeks, her shoulders, her hands. They are made from something more durable like iron or brass. When she smiles, it is as if a bell has been struck, as if music has entered the world the way God intended: at noon by the sea.
Daisy Hernandez
The two smallest boys were cut down first, bodies bounding in different directions as they were shot from opposite sides of the field, like pinballs caught in a tight corner.
Cole Alpaugh
His face clouded over when Calvin and Peachy tried to explain women. Peachy pressed on bravely. “Now, the purpose of the vagina,” he was saying. He stopped and said to Calvin, “Why can’t we just buy him a book?
David Pratt
The drive to Black Rock City from San Francisco leads through the Nevada flatlands, past the jittering neon sadness of Reno.
Daniel Pinchbeck
The ones who hate me the most are the ones who don't scare me.
Rebecca McKinsey
Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?
Nigel Slater
...I gave you painted air - tears I couldn't weep - truths I couldn't speak - all the words that caught in my throat...
John Geddes
Maybe I was praying for him then, in my own way. Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?
Dorothy Day