Quotes by Journalists - Page 17

(John F.) Kennedy was an elitist and not a populist. He was enthralled by a certain British aristocratic view of politics in which an enlightened ruling class makes reasoned, rational decisions that are in the interest of the more emotional and easily manipulated masses.
Scott Farris
A person with taste is merely one who can recognize the greatest beauty in the simplest things.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
It is strange, is it not, how an accident of a millimeter here, a millimeter there, makes one face so important. Think about it Elliot, She has two eyes, a nose, a mouth, just like everyone else. It,s all in tiny degrees of placement, such small area of magic to make such a big difference. For me, Elliot, I must tell you it is a hard thing to understand- why these things, these millimeters, are so crucial to you, you of all men.
Judith Krantz
If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.
Michael Lewis
Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.
Miguel Syjuco
Trippers and askers surround me,People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward andcity I live in, or the nation,The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors oldand new,My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or lossor lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,the fitful events;These come to me days and nights and go from me again,But they are not the Me myself.Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog withlinguists and contenders,I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
Walt Whitman
As sometimes happens with men who wish to fight but do not or cannot, Reagan developed a romantic image of the military.
Scott Farris
...at dawn, the grains of sleep turn to floating black spots, then out of focus the world tilts, and the cat scratches at the door...
John Geddes
I was happy with her and I suspect I never knew her.Would I have been truly happy if I had actually known her?
José Eduardo Agualusa
I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.
Lev Grossman
Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority.
Christopher Hitchens
When men reach their sixties and retire they go to pieces. Women just go right on cooking.
Gail Sheehy
...I remember the oily smoke of a cigarette suspended in a shaft of sunlight - with you, everything was beautiful...
John Geddes
Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference in their lives. But I know it makes a difference in mine.
Elizabeth Rusch
This melodrama differed from others in that it was not written, it was to be played impromptu, and only once; after that it would be precedent, and would determine the destinies of mankind perhaps for centuries. Each of the actors hoped to write it his way, and no living man could say what the dénouement would be.
Upton Sinclair
Things change when you're not in danger anymore.
Mitch Albom
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people: it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
Walter Bagehot
You know, sometimes I wish they would do this for us when we come home alive.
Jim Sheeler
Truth and falsehood pass through the same lips and leave no mark, the devil does not cease to be the devil just because he may have spoken the truth.
José Saramago
How you treat:-the mailman-the cashier-the garbage man-the usher-the custodian-the receptionist-the uber driversays A LOT about you.
Germany Kent
Some people spend their entire lives devoted to a religion that claims to be the ‘right’ religion... they often deny scientific evidence that contradicts their archaic holy books, they sometimes oppress those who disagree with them, and they always do what they do in the name of an unknowable deity... but sometimes, they wake up. Occasionally, they realize that all religions are man-made and that none of them are ‘right.’ And when they do, they can live happy and fulfilling lives without dogma and without anticipating or fearing an afterlife.
David G. McAfee
A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
Naomi Wolf
At the end of the day, we all live in this world together and to practice bringing peace onto Twitter is a huge step into bringing peace into our world.
Germany Kent
When the contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they have an unsettling effect on the conscious mind of everyone. When this psychic dynamic is not consciously metabolized, not just within an individual but collectively, the mental state of the people as a whole might well be compared to a psychosis.
Paul Levy
One person's garbage is another person's commodity.
Aleksandar Hemon
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
Frank Herbert
What I’ve learned is there’s a scientifically proven phenomenon that’s attached to gratitude, and that if you consciously take note of what is good in your life, quantifiable benefits happen.
Deborah Norville
It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.
Michael Pollan
The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
Philip Gourevitch
poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you
Walt Whitman
His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.
Christopher Hitchens
I am your stone of necessity calling up spirits from rain puddles—your Magus of words
John Geddes
The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.
David Halberstam
Allan Emmanuelle Karlsson closed his eyes and felt perfectly convinced that he would now pass away for ever. It had been exciting, the entire journey, but nothing lasts for ever, except possibly general stupidity.
Jonas Jonasson
Let’s put to rest one cliché. You can sell refrigerators to Eskimos. The people of Savoonga are Yupiks, the westernmost of the Eskimo tribes, closer to Siberians than American Eskimos in their appearance, and their customs, and their distinctive, liquidly sibilant native language. And, yes, they all have refrigerators. In the winter, food gets freezer burn if left out in the elements. Eskimos need refrigerators to keep their food warm.
Gene Weingarten
…and from that moment Buck hated him with a bitter and deathless hatred.
Jack London
I never bought a man who wasn't for sale. -W.A. Clark, ascribed
Bill Dedman
In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: "Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won't like God.
George F. Will
Be around people that make you want to be a better person, who make you feel good, make you laugh, and remind you what's important in life.
Germany Kent
Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.
Franklin Foer
And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.
Chuck Klosterman
It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.
Geraldine Brooks
If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker's son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to prove that he was not chicken, and to live up to his mother's championship standards, and if he was going to have some moments left over to savor his delight in the game, he obviously needed considerable practice, so he borrowed keys to the gym and set a schedule for himself that he adhereded to for four full years—in the school year, three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day.
John McPhee
...you can have a dark heart and be a writer, but you can't have a black one..
John Geddes
In fact, most of us see perseverance as a distinctly uncreative approach, the sort of strategy that people with mediocre ideas are forced to rely on.
Jonah Lehrer
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.
Sarah Vowell
(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.
David Brooks
The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.
Émile Zola
...when it comes to defining adulthood, nothing has made me feel more grown-up than knowing that one of the two people in the world who loved me the most, without condition, was no longer in the world.
Jean Hannah Edelstein
Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual," said Madame Rocher, "he is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn't been for this wretched war, he would be at least a colonel by now.
Nancy Mitford
I was told that there was nothing for me but to come here. But, as with life itself, it may not be our choice to come, but it is our choice to leave.
Katherine Marsh
It’s so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen… She stares out of her window at the busy street, where the British go about their daily business, taking it for granted that they will never be arrested for not voting the right way, praying the right way, dressing the right way or for belonging to a different tribe.
Amanda Craig
Pete and Repeat went out in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was saved?
Gayle Forman
I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Powerful women always interpret hostility as unrequited love.
Tina Brown
Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?
George Orwell
All of them with their own lives, untouched by mine. Or each other's.
Simon Beckett
Clusters of bats hung like bunches of withered grapes from the roof and when, from time to time, either Kerim's head or Bond's brushed against them, they exploded twittering into the darkness.
Ian Fleming
Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, “Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee.” (Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.)
Alex Haley