Quotes by Journalists - Page 184

Normally I would have been the first to go in search of cannibal monks, particularly as I had heard of a similar tradition at a nunnery in the Philippines. It's the sort of quest I can't resist.
Tahir Shah
For it was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than a person.
Clifford D. Simak
Dawn raced like fire across the savanna.
Mike Bond
Here, then, are some ways we can try to prevent mistakes. We can foster the ability to listen to each other and the freedom to speak our minds. We can create open and transparent environments instead of cultures of secrecy and concealment. And we can permit and encourage everyone, not just a powerful inner circle, to speak up when they see the potential for error.These measures might be a prescription for identifying and eliminating mistakes, but they sound like something else: a prescription for democracy. That's not an accident. Although we don't normally think of it in these terms, democratic governance represents another method—this time a political rather than an industrial or personal one—for accepting the existence of error and trying to curtail its more dangerous incarnations.
Kathryn Schulz
He believed the press was doing its job, but, in the absence of candor from the committee, it had reached unfair conclusions about some people. Sloan himself was a prime example. He was not bitter, just disillusioned. All he wanted now was to clean up his legal obligations - testimony in the trial and in the civil suit - and leave Washington forever. He was looking for a job in industry, a management position, but it was difficult. His name had been in the papers often. He would not work for the White House again even if asked to come back. He wished he were in Bernstein's place, wished he could write. Maybe then he could express what had been going through his mind. Not the cold, hard facts of Watergate necessarily - that wasn't really what was important. But what it was like for young men and women to come to Washington because they believed in something and then to be inside and see how things worked and watch their own ideals disintegrate.
Carl Bernstein
Whether one is twenty forty or sixty whether one has succeeded failed or just muddled along whether yesterday was full of sun or storm or one of those dull days with no weather at all life begins each morning! ... Each morning is the open door to a new world-new vistas new aims new tryings.
Leigh Mitchell Hodges
[That] speaks to one of the most important roles of a leader; to boil down an organization's many priorities into a simple plan, so that employees can remember it, internalize it, and act on it.
Adam Bryant
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
Albert Camus
I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
Christopher Hitchens
Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.
H.L. Mencken
The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due - that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege - many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The old definition: 'Money: something everybody else has and I must get,' would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Some of it she now held in her hand - two soft, green ten-dollar bills - and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it.
Theodore Dreiser
Failing to be there when a man wants her is a woman's greatest sin except to be there when he doesn't want her.
Helen Rowland
He never bothered listening to sports; the bored him, every one of them.
Michael Finkel
You're in the democratic West now, lady. Anybody's as good as anybody else as long as he's got the dough to prove it.
Leslie Ford
I embraced her and she did not object at all. She let herself be kissed and kissed back, but coolly, without conviction, absently, as if she were smoking a cigarette.
Mihail Sebastian
The triumph of hope over experience.
Jojo Moyes
We’re all livin’ in the past...we’re really always eighty milliseconds behind life happenin’. ...that’s how long it takes our brains to comprehend what’s already taken place right in front of our eyes. So, I guess I’m not alone. Everyone’s livin’ in the past, to some extent. I’ve just become a prisoner of mine. ... I’ve become a prisoner—willingly. But then I guess you really can’t be called a prisoner if you willingly carry the chains.
Laura Miller
One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against.
Joshua Rothman
Why, when men hate themselves, it’s women who take the beatings.
Lindy West
It never got weird enough for me.
Hunter S. Thompson
A liberal is a man who is willing to spend somebody else's money.
Carter Glass
We had the kind of conversations that only great friends can ever share. They were touched with magic.
Tahir Shah
We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it we have lived by it we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god and we ask no one else to bow down before it.
Carl T. Rowan
Always regret the things you did do, never the things you didn't.
Dorothy Koomson
Events went on to show that it is not by chance that a prime minister reaches such lofty heights and that, as the infallible wisdom of nations has demonstrated time and time again, each country gets the government it deserves, although it must be said that while it is true to say that prime ministers, for good or ill, are not all the same, it is no less true to say, are all countries.
José Saramago
Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instants recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On a deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman's mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein
I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.—John Cavil, Cylon Model Number One, “No Exit
Patrick Di Justo
Unless you are rich and can convalesce in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to find you at your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments, errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.
Virginia Heffernan
Time flies with you
Mitch Albom
Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.
Mark Helprin
Perhaps once in a lifetime we meet someone who has the ability to inspire us in one brief meeting, who can confront not one but two life-threatening illnesses with remarkable courage – and instil hope in others in the face of the greatest adversity.Jennifer Roberts had all of those qualities – and so many more.
Paul Roberts
But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.
Mitch Albom
Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.
Ambrose Bierce
Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.
Louise Doughty
But you have to remember...that you can't run from unhappiness. You just take it with you.
Karen Wheeler
Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
Dorothy Day
Anyone called upon to view misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.
Joseph Roth
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
Jean-Paul Kauffmann
You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim
Jeannette Walls
Remember that the bad days are not forever, and the trouble which seems so terrible at last.
George Orwell
Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of gray stone.
Italo Calvino
…the worshipers here are not likely to kill one another, they all offer the same sacrifice, and how the fat spits and the carcasses sizzle as God in the sublime heavens inhales the odors of all this carnage with satisfaction. Jesus pressed his lamb to his breast, unable to fathom why God could not be appeased with a cup of milk poured over His altar, that sap of life which passes from one being to another, or with a handful of wheat, the basic substance of immortal bread. Soon he will have to part with the old man’s generous gift, his for such a short time, the poor little lamb will not live to see the sun set this day, it is time to mount the stairs of the Temple, to deliver it to the knife and sacrificial fire, as if it were no longer worthy of existence or being punished…
José Saramago
I care about you as people, and I believe you are capable of great things. Each of you will contribute something to this world. You are important. You would be missed.
Cindy L. Rodriguez
She's beautiful,' he murmured.'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
George Orwell
...the most beautiful things don't always make you happy - often they make you weep...
John Geddes
Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.
Sally Brampton
And if that's the case -- if we are our remembering selves -- then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. "You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.
Jennifer Senior
I said here's the river I want to flow on here's the direction I want to go and put my boat in. I was ready for the river to take unexpected turns and present obstacles.
Nancy Woodhull
Sexual objectification doesn't get oppressive until it is done consistently, and to a specific group of people, and with no regard whatsoever paid to their humanity. Then it ceases to become about desire and starts to be about control. Seeing another person as meat and fat and bone and nothing else gives you power over them, if only for an instant. Structural sexual objection of women draws that instant out into an entire matrix of hurt. It tells us that women are bodies first, idealised, subservient bodies, and men are not.
Laurie Penny
To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.
Derek Thompson
...open the access to your heart and write down what your voice is whispering...
John Geddes
End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.
David Carr
Three words for a writer: Make me care.
Buffy Andrews
Maybe the same essential download was also being delivered to other people—a massive, compassionate battalion of us—at the same time.
Jonathan Talat Phillips
Thanks for nothing, regular human mom. Footnote: nothing except for the unconditional love and support and meticulous care to make sure I faced the world fully informed about my body and reproductive health.
Lindy West
Frequently, friendship is represented as something too steadily pleasant, or in certain of the masterpieces of the past -- Aristotle and Cicero, for example -- as pervaded by a constant mutual understanding and a gentle calm. Friendship is also an emotional relationship, with involvement that can get hot at times, like any other deep involvement with a person.
Stuart Miller
A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.
Hunter S. Thompson
We are not on our fours, howling in the woods, only because guilt saves us.
Nelson Rodrigues
The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.
David Halberstam
When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in thetlecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman