Quotes by Journalists - Page 181

Song of myselfA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Walt Whitman
If you believe in your heart that you are right, then you must fight with all your might to do it your way. Only dead fish swim with the stream all the time.
Linda Ellerbee
Ninety percent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves their abilities their frailties and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves.
Sydney J. Harris
As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who had never, since they left school, had anything productive to do; adults in the embittered by years of suffering and hardship. The President's Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole lost generation of young people.
Robert A. Caro
In response to a tactless question he once said to me, ‘What do you expect? This lousy neighbourhood gave me the come-on. I couldn’t resist.
Jacques Yonnet
To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.
Murray Kempton
The hardest bit of information to extract is the first piece.
Robert Ferrigno
Goats' refusal of young blackbrush shoots, furthermore, is outright. They want nothing to do with it. Provenza pointed at his hand, then his arm and body, and said, "Every organ and every cell has receptors similar to what's in your nose and on your tongue." Creatures communicate within their environment the same way they communicate within their own bodies -- through chemical trigger substances that bind to receptors and produce responses. "It's all part of a feedback system," Provenza said, "that tells the body what's good and what isn't."Goats are not stupid after all. They don't bumble through the world eating what they were born to like. They experience need states, satisfaction, and delight along with aversions to strong a mere hint of something can make them turn away in disgust. Flavor is what nutrition feels like to a goat. If goats had a word for delicious, it would have two meanings. The first would be: I like this. The second would be: This is what my body needs. For goats, they are the same thing.
Mark Schatzker
The niftiest turn of phrase the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.
Jeff Greenfield
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.
George Orwell
The promise of Plath's work was that a woman could de-fang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Bronte, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for "sins" that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was -- her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men -- she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.
Sady Doyle
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
H.L. Mencken
Remember what happened last time with the 'cuda.
Carl Hiaasen
I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.
Marilyn Johnson
Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits that which he has and that which he thinks he has.
Alphonse Karr
The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on ‘our side’. Is it?
Christopher Hitchens
...we confidently say that it's not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.
José Saramago
Being a father, having an heir, seem to add an extra dimension to David. He had always been of vivid, animating presence in any room he entered. But now he would come from visiting the boy crackling with even greater energy and force. He had been engaged listener, ready to learn what any man might have to offer in discussion, but now there was an additional depth to his questions, a more far-reaching vision behind his decisions. He thought now beyond the span of years, and into a future that glistened ahead into centuries. It's one thing, I suppose, to have a prophet tell you that you will found a dynasty. Now, it seemed, he allowed himself to truly believe it.
Geraldine Brooks
Constable N stepped away from the car, into the darkness where Darren could not see where his gun was pointing, and fired two rounds into the air. The gunshots cracked the roof of the night sky and echoed back at us. My first thought was that they could be heard all over Toekomsrus; I wondered how many imaginations had in that instant conjured a different story to explain the gunshots; a record of all those stories, I found myself thinking, would probably document every fear this place has of itself and its young men.
Jonny Steinberg
From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.
George F. Will
To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe.
Ernest Hemingway
Daemons had minds of their own, which could never be harnessed, even by those who sheltered them.
Curtis Bill Pepper
...with you, I find peace from pain - You are gentle and healing like the landscape—like rain...
John Geddes
And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.
Lev Grossman
I realize then that it's not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.
Gayle Forman
Life is at its best when everything has fallen out of place, and you decide that you're going to fight to get them right, not when everything is going your way and everyone is praising you.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.
Marya Hornbacher
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Ernest Hemingway
Contrary to what is generally believed, meaning and sense were never the same thing, meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself, univocal, if you like, while sense cannot stay still, it seethes with second, third and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide and subdivide into branches and branchlets, until they disappear from view, the sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.
José Saramago
It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world.
Dorothy Dix
In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of the selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank.
Marya Hornbacher
If you thing political correctness is no big deal, just remember that the communists started by eliminating inconvenient speech and ended by eliminating inconvenient people.
James Crabtree
When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.
Peter Heller
...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...
John Geddes
For nearly thirty years the powerful propaganda machines of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky's name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor. To the present Soviet generation, and not only to it, Trotsky's life-story is already like an ancient Egyptian sepulchre which is known to have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved in gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers and ghouls have plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace is found of the record it once contained. The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of independent Western historians and scholars.
Isaac Deutscher
By concentrating on what I was grateful for, I was able to stave off despair.
Amanda Lindhout
We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'.
Christopher Hitchens
As my heart begins to return to normal, I look down at -- and feel such an intense rush of love and relief it takes my breath away. "I will never let you put of my sight again," I promise --
Camilla Way
Heartache, guilt, loss, grief, these things, too, are monsters.
Chelsey Philpot
Surely we want to get to a point where women can be strong and powerful and not sexy. Or only sexy when they feel like it, not as a requirement to getting media coverage or being valued.
Anna Kessel
On Saturday mornings Mr Ewing would make his rounds, giving each tradesman £1 and the apprentices, ten shillings. Needless to say, we were all peeping around corners awaiting his arrival!
Ian Thompson
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus
A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
Pete Hamill
...it's merely writing, but you have to adjust your ear – I speak quietly – I sob – I whisper...
John Geddes
Why is it that happiness remembered feels like despair?
Heather Chaplin
Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.
Aleksandar Hemon
Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the New Jerusalem? Will the cultural goods we devote our lives to - the food we cook and consume; the music we purchase and practice; the movies we watch and make; the enterprises we earn our paychecks from and invest our wealth in - be identified as the glory and honor of our cultural tradition? Or will they be remembered as mediocrities at best, dead-ends at worst? This is not the same as asking whether we are making "christian" culture.
Andy Crouch
[To admit that college isn't for everyone] may sound élitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers. But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of young adults that their futures depend on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish.It is absurd that people have to get college degrees to be considered for good jobs in hotel management or accounting — or journalism. It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs. The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it.
Ramesh Ponnuru
[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families--only to find that by then their families were gone.
Larissa MacFarquhar
Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.
Richard Manning
...every time I look at you autumn leaves come in between - does it matter they're the color of your hair - or they still fall in my memory?...
John Geddes
(LBJ) had what a journalist calls “a genius for analogy”— made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate
Robert A. Caro
...I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads,and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused.
Bruce Feiler
Religion is the opium of the poor
Ernest Hemingway
It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.
Zoë Heller
Well-liked… a dangerous quality in a leader.
Robert Ferrigno
We were together. I forget the rest.
Walt Whitman
Each of us does in effect strike a series of "deals " or compromises between the wants and longings of the inner self and an outer environment that offers certain possibilities and sets certain limitations.
Maggie Scarf
Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power," Tuek said. "You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.
Frank Herbert
The dictatorship is like an aria that never becomes an opera.
Emilia Pardo Bazán