Quotes by Journalists - Page 164

I never thought it would be easy to serve God," she said. "I just didn't think it would be this hard.
Frank Herbert
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.
Ernest Hemingway
The politicians looked after the mandarins. The mandarins looked after the central bankers and the regulators. (The governor of the Central Bank was paid more in 2008 than the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, as was the chief executive of the Financial Regulator.) The Central Bankers looked after the bankers. The bankers looked after IBEC. And IBEC looked after the government. The circle of oligarchs was watertight.
Shane Ross
Earlier in [2007] the [Prime Minister's Office] had also drawn criticism for trying to muzzle the judiciary. The reproach came from Antonio Lamer, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court....'I must say I was taken aback,' said Lamer, who sat on the Supreme Court for twenty years. 'The prime minister is going the wrong route as regards the independence of the judiciary. He's trying to interfere with the sentencing process.
Lawrence Martin
He loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey.
Arthur Machen
You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.
David Brooks
Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.
Ann Wroe
Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.
Miguel Syjuco
The word feminism has become synonymous with man-hating when in fact it has more to do with women than men.
Aysha Taryam
Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream…The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried out best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
Ta-Nahisi Coates
The fear of the drugs running out is manageable-the fear of time running down isn’t.
Ann Marlowe
Posting dramatic charts or funny pictures is good and giving people smart reasons to believe what they already think is great.
Derek Thompson
And though history sadly doesn't credit the man who first thought of tilting a bicycle's steering axis, it is more likely to be because of feet striking the wheel than an understanding of stability.
Robert Penn
To most of the general public, language comes down less to wonder than a rather censorious bifurcated sentiment – namely, that the vast majority of the world's humans either speak and something primitive or speak something badly.
Robert Lane Greene
A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.
Marilyn Johnson
What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.
Rebecca Traister
I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.
Martha Gellhorn
... the scarlet thread,the red clay from which we were made, runs in tiny streams through all our veins, reminding us of where we began...
John Geddes
Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable.
Albert Camus
By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being -- what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift.
Ada Calhoun
I had lost confidence and a sense of self. Who am I? Am I a person who cowers in fear at the back of a spin class, avoiding everyone’s gaze? This uncertainty about who I am, this confusion over where I truly was in the time line of my illness and recovery, was ultimately the deeper source of the shame. A part of my soul believed that I would never be myself, the carefree, confident Susannah, again.
Susannah Cahalan
The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.
Lev Grossman
That's what this country needs -- more books!
Christopher Morley
In 2015, when I went back to the States or to an international conference, I found that people didn’t much care anymore. They saw the Middle East awash in blood, beyond redemption, and didn’t want to read about it or see it on the evening news. They just wanted to keep away from it.
Richard Engel
We are all born free from all religious affiliations and only come to believe in such things after being introduced to it ― so, atheism is the default position. Although some children are not indoctrinated with a specific religion before the age of reason, there are many more who are.
David G. McAfee
Giving up is the ultimate tragedy.
Robert J. Donovan
EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbour's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime, the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his gluteus maximus.
Ambrose Bierce
In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will there be another super-superman to follow and another super-super-superman after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline come after, with return down the long line, through the superman down to man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether, and empty space?
H.L. Mencken
Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.
William Cullen Bryant
how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist
José Saramago
Triumph often is nearest when defeat seems inescapable.
B.C. Forbes
What the Didache doesn’t say is that the community should shun or excommunicate those who commit the forbidden sins. In fact, “correct some, pray for others, and some you should love more than your own life” makes plain that the worst sinners should be showered with the most love.
Tony Jones
You seldom get what you go after unless you know in advance what you want.
Maurice Switzer
The key point some Christians miss is that scientific ignorance about the beginning of life, or any of life's processes, is not evidence of a god.
Guy P. Harrison
Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had."; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]
Anna Quindlen
When you’re accustomed to loneliness, you become in tune with the rhythms of yourself and your own mind—because you always have to answer yourself at the end of the day, to be alone with your thoughts. You’ll also know how important self-love and reliance is, to love yourself before you love someone else, but I think the universality of loneliness teaches us what that love is. To be lonely is to be human, to feel pain, to be forced to know yourself—and the universality of it binds us. Love is embracing that universality and surrendering to it. It’s looking out at a lonely universe and knowing it’s fabric makes you who you are.
Nico Lang
Stop telling me I’m oppressed.....I’m not a victim. I don’t know why feminists are so hellbent on characterizing me as one.....Feminists don’t speak for me. They’re not my voice. They’re not my representation. I owe them nothing, except maybe a shred of sympathy. How miserable must they be to see oppression at every turn?...You DON’T speak for me. You DON’T represent me or my concerns....We’re living proof that the modern day feminist movement is a crock.Feminists are victims of their own delusions, and we’ll never buy what they’re selling.
Hannah Bleau
Prototypes of inventions that use novel combinations of resonance, magnetism, states of matter, certain geometries or inward swirling motion to unlock the secrets of universal energy have already been built. They provide proof of new or rediscovered principles. In many variations of these inventions, a small input triggers a disproportionately large output of useable power.""These energy converters don't violate any laws of physics if they simply tap into a previously unrecognized source of power - background space. A flow of energy from that source can continue day and night, whether or not the sun shines or the wind blows.
Jeane Manning
But that's the thing about all of this," he says gently but urgently, "we survive. After each known down, each earth shattering blow, we get up again. Even though we walk through hell, and it feels like all we do is walk through hell, we do eventually make it to the otherside. Scarred. Mostly broken. But we survive. And then we start to rebuild ourselves. We're never the same, but we do rebuild ourselves. Because something like this is just another way in which we change. We all have to change.
Dorothy Koomson
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
H.L. Mencken
On the wall of Amshad's office there was a poster that made me laugh: DO NOT GIVE ME A BANGLE, GIVE ME A PEN. Well-meaning charities often train illiterate slum women to make cheap trinkets.
Edward Luce
Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace.
Mark Matousek
Each subject perceives and instigates the violence within the philosophy of nonviolence since injustice, hatred and such conduct hold the feeling of violence, even changing the system, first, passes the violence before it prevails. Despite that, violence also exists, in one's thoughts, without exception; however, the question is not the violence, but self-control that demonstrates the peace, which approaches the victory and supremacy.
Ehsan Sehgal
I'm working on this book on the trial of Socrates. It started out with the idea of the problem of freedom of thought...and expression...I started by spending a year on the English Seventeenth Century Revolutions, and I had a fascinating time. And then I felt I couldn't understand the English Seventeenth Century Revolutions without understanding the Reformation. When I got to the Reformation, I felt that I had to understand the premonitory movements that began in the Middle Ages. When I got there, I felt I had to understand the classical period." (quoted in Andrew Patner, I. F. Stone: A Portrait, p. 21)
I.F. Stone
Every man carries his own past with him," Hayt said.
Frank Herbert
True love is night jasmine a diamond in darkness the heartbeat no cardiologist has ever heard. It is the most common of miracles fashioned of fleecy clouds - a handful of stars tossed into the night sky.
Jim Bishop
Anxiety is who people want you to be. Calm is who you are.
Maria Dorfner
Eaters of Wonder BreadMust be underbred.So little to eat.Where's the wheat?
Roy Blount Jr.
We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way.
Christopher Hitchens
The record must be hurled like a stone under history's wheel in order to stop it.
Gustawa Jarecka
Neutrality as a lasting principle is an evidence of weakness.
Louis Kossuth
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
George Orwell
What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of “honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the law to serve them.
Jeff Sharlet
In a world where you can get a spare kidney, a black-market Picasso or a ticket to ride into space, why can’t I see some actual sex? Some actual fucking from people who want to fuck each other? Some chick in an outfit I halfway respect, having the time of her life? I have MONEY. I’m willing to PAY for this. I AM NOW A 35-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, AND I JUST WANT A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INTERNATIONAL PORN INDUSTRY WHERE I CAN SEE A WOMAN COME. I just want to see a good time.
Caitlin Moran
intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When
Matt Taibbi
Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.
D.T. Max
Frankly, Pedro Almodóvar's recent box office hit, Volver, is the first movie I've seen in which a young woman's retaliation against sexual violence doesn't ultimately boomerang around to destroy her
Sarah Stillman
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
Walt Whitman
Middle age is youth without its levity And age without decay.
Daniel Defoe
The more clearly we are able to express ourselves, the less room there is for ambiguity. The more elaborate and the more precise our vocabulary, the greater the scope for thought and expression. Language is about subtlety and nuance. It is power and it is potent. We can woo with words and we can wound. Despots fear the words of the articulate opponent. Successful revolutions are achieved with words as much as with weapons.
John Humphrys