Quotes by Journalists - Page 178

Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

I wear the writer pants in the family.

If I guess your secret, will you tell me if I'm right?" His father laughed but didn't answer.

...I remember your profile in darkness outlined by stars ...

An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.

This is not a book about race, though the disproportionate number of those who fell that day were black, and certain racial themes are unavoidable. It is not a book that sets out to compare the United States unfavorably with Britain, though it is written by a Briton to whom gun culture is alien. Finally, it is not a book about gun control; it is a book made possible by the absence of gun control.

Hate is contagious. A few seconds after Donald Trump has told me something hateful, somebody else repeats it. He has legitimized what people only dare say in their kitchens and bedrooms.

Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that.

The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.

[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.

When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.

At the street corner, a one-storey house built of freestone, but repulsively decrepit and filthy, seemed to command the entrance, like a gaol. And here, indeed, lived La Méchain, like a vigilant proprietess, ever on the watch, exploiting in person her little population of starving tenants.

The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin’s critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead.

Only fools prefer the past!

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

Even the most innocent of men's affairs seem doomed to cause suffering. Pushing the lawnmower through tall wet grass, and enjoying the strong aroma of the morning, I found that the blades had cut a frog in half. I have not forgotten his eyes.

Only the ideas penetrate and prevail nothing unless one has the knowledge, to bring that into the practical form; otherwise, buying the ideas, shows one's idiocy.

Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine -- four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and cut loose at three in the morning, when all the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked the bike completely and it took several months to have it rebuilt. After that I decided to ride it differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a helmet and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit ... my insurance had already been canceled and my driver's license was hanging by a thread.So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head ... but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz ... not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway Beach.There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip.

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

Others may argue about whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper. I just want to make sure mine doesn't end with a whine.

In fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions –– its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage –– that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.

Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.

China is a political beast, with the Party at its heart, and the importance of political and regulatory due diligence cannot be overstated.

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.

He said that we belonged together because he was born with a flower and I was born with a butterfly and that flowers and butterflies need each other for survival.

Risk is the unique path to success.

But that's one way we can identify the devil's voice: It always plays to our fears. It is the voice that tells us we must do something to prove who we are, to prove that we're worthy, to prove that we are who God has already declared us to be. When we know we are loved by God, we don't have to prove anything to anyone. There is nothing we can do to make ourselves more beloved than we are.

When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time

You´re my son, Ed. You might be idiotic and irresponsible, but it doesn´t make the slightest difference to what I feel for you. I´m pissed off that you could have thought it would

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Modern warfare is an intricate business about which no one knows everything and few know very much.

Many women think that if they put out too quickly, their partner won't respect them. This is not the case. It's not about waiting for a certain quantity of time before having sex, it's about waiting for a certain quality of connection.

I'm walking insecurity. Without all this makeup I look like a refugee when I get up in the morning.... I generally look like one major bowwow. I mean arf.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.

Patriotism is not defined by loyalty to a particular elected official or political party. Indeed, excess loyalty to a single individual or party is the very antithesis of patriotism, as it places fealty to that individual or party over allegiance to the country, its interests, and its values. True patriotism is measured by the extent to which one believes in, and is willing to fight for and defend, the defining values and core principles of our country.

The best people always care their goodness, civility, courtesy, and fairness. But not the bad.

Someone must have talked plenty, because on an afternoon in June 2008, Sarvannantha Pereira was detained by men who didn't say who whey were. They would call it an arrest. It felt more like an abduction.

I cannot, of course, prove that there is no supervising deity who invigilates my every momentand who will pursue me even after I am dead. (I can only be happy that there is no evidence forsuch a ghastly idea, which would resemble a celestial North Korea in which liberty was not justimpossible but inconceivable.) But nor has any theologian ever demonstrated the contrary. Thiswould perhaps make the believer and the doubter equal—except that the believer claims to know,not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actuallyknown. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance andconsiderable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being cantell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate theseterms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. This tyrannical idea is very much older than P a g e | 5 of 29Christianity, of course, but I do sometimes think that Christians have less excuse for believing, letalone wishing, that such a horrible thing could be true.

No doubt alcohol tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

...I always thought youth were idealists - now, I'm not so sure - I'm more idealistic now then at 17...

I exist as I am that is enough If no other in the world be aware I sit content And if each and all be aware I sit content.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.

He is trapped underground, suddenly and unexpectedly close to death, but still in control of his fate. "At that moment I put death in my head and decided I would live with it," he says later.

Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist

It did no good to cry, she had learned that early on.

And suddenly I got what the big deal was about kissing. How someone could suck on your bottom lip and make you come completely undone. That someone stroking the hair back from your face could make you swoon and someone sliding his hands underneath your top could make you feel wanted for the first time in your life.

Apologize: To lay the foundation for a future offence.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

The extraordinary triumph of the cellphone among India’s poor stemmed from its ability to enable a most mundane human need, which is to chat with other people. And when the poor chat, it is not always about curing a child of diarrhea.

He look'd a little disorder'd, when he said this, but I did not apprehend any thing from it at that time, believing as it us'd to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them.

When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.

The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

After breakfast I spent an hour cleaning my revolver and trying my skill at a target. Jane shook her head, probably thinking that bullets were vain against demonic powers. But Perdita was hugely delighted with the shining little instrument and wanted it for a plaything; women of all ages will play with death! ("Absolute Evil")

No wars, in the war-logged record of our species, have been terminal. Until now, when we know that nuclear war would be the death of our planet. It is beyond belief that any governments–those brief political figures–arrogate to themselves the right to stop history, at their discretion.

Furthermore--though it was quite irrelevant now--he had no idea his killer, Kazuo Kiriyama, had, in his mansion that was much larger than Toshinori's home in Shiroiwa-cho, mastered the violin at a level far superior to Toshinori's a long time ago--and then tossed his violin into the trash.

They say that, if we manage to live without too great an effort, it is entirely owing to the automatism which makes us unconscious of a great part of our movements. In order to take one single step, it seems, we displace an infinite number of muscles, and yet, thanks to this automatism, we are unaware of it. The same thing happens in our relations with other people.

My balls shrank in terror. I was convinced we were going to die.