Quotes by Journalists - Page 188

There are two types of people on planet Earth, Batman and Iron Man. Batman has a secret identity, right? So Bruce Wayne has to walk around every second of every day knowing that if somebody finds out his secret, his family is dead, his friends are dead, everyone he loves gets tortured to death by costumed supervillains. And he has to live with the weight of that secret every day. But not Tony Stark, he's open about who he is. He tells the world he's Iron Man, he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't have that shadow hanging over him, he doesn't have to spend energy building up those walls of lies around himself. You're one or the other - either you're one of those people who has to hide your real self because it would ruin you if it came out, because of your secret fetishes or addictions or crimes, or you're not one of those people. And the two groups aren't even living in the same universe.
David Wong
In a nutshell, the universe is 4% visible, 23% undetectable and 73% unimaginable. Welcome to the cosmos, full of mass you can measure but not manhandle, driven by a force you can infer but not explain.
Tim Radford
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.
Joan Didion
...but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.
Joseph O'Connor
Friendship will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long.
Robert Lynd
I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]
Ernest Hemingway
What was the constant?Movement. Yes. With time there was always movement. The setting sun. The dripping water. Thependulums. The spilling sand. To realize his destiny, such movement had to cease. He had to stop the flowof time completely …
Mitch Albom
Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213)
Julia Angwin
Control.... is not what we need.What we need is to bend to the tempest like pine and palm trees - flexible, adaptive, attuned, yet fully rooted in our principles.
Patricia Pearson
Pentru mine, moartea este doar hotarul unde încetează să mai existe "mâine". Numai până acolo poți să iubești, să visezi, să regreți. Brusc, tot ce n-ai făcut va rămâne pentru totdeauna nefăcut.
Octavian Paler
going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside—to say, ‘This is the way it was.’
John McPhee
I turn to Willa Cather’s quote: Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Cameron Conaway
Taken slowly, or mindfully, even eating an orange or a bowl of soup, or a small piece of dark chocolate for that matter, can take on the flavor or prayer.
Mary DeTurris Poust
People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.
Norman Cousins
The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.
Aleksandar Hemon
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!
Hunter S. Thompson
As a journalist, I can also now understand his (Patrick O'Brian's)idea that the Q&A is not particularly civilized — let alone a sports media press scrum. The formats don’t necessarily further understanding between two people. It is not always true conversation — a discussion that unearths nuggets of insight. It too often seems like interviewers are running through a pre-fab checklist, looking for a Tweetable quote, trolling for a gaffe, or ticking off pre-conceived points like those on a medical checklist at the doctor’s office. It can feel invasive, like a trip to the proctologist — in front of an audience.
Knute Berger
You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes."Do they ever make more sense?"No.
Mitch Albom
Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Malcolm Gladwell
I can't go back," said Towser. "Nor I," said Fowler. "They would turn me back into a dog," said Towser. "And me," said Fowler, "back into a man.
Clifford D. Simak
Al he knew was that he'd never met anyone who caused him to doubt and to hope as much as she did.
Catherine Bennett
I'm not letting go of you.
Jojo Moyes
Here's the hell of it: madness doesn't announce itself. There isn't time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay; it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge.
Marya Hornbacher
Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.
Christopher Hitchens
Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark−haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
George Orwell
She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.
Joan Didion
from the Basement tapes Eric outdid Dylan with the apologies. To the untrained eye, he seemed sincere. The psychologists on the case found Eric less convincing. They saw a psychopath. Classic. He even pulled the stunt of self-diagnosing to dismiss it. "I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn't have any remorse," Eric said. "But I do."Watching that made Dr. Fuselier angry. Remorse meant a deep desire to correct a mistake. Eric hadn't done it yet. He excused his actions several times on the tapes. Fuselier was tough to rattle, but that got to him."Those are the most worthless apologies I've ever heard in my life," he said. It got more ludicrous later, when Eric willed some of his stuff to two buddies, "if you guys live.""If you live?" Fuselier repeated. "They are going to go in there and quite possibly kill their friends. If they were the least bit sorry they would not do it!
Dave Cullen
Acts 16:9 is the meddler's motto, simultaneously selfless and self-serving, generous but stuck-up. Into every generation of Americans is born a new crop of buttinskys sniffing out the latest Macedonia that may or may not want their help.
Sarah Vowell
Unlike Kim Cardassian or Donald Trump, Montaigne regarded the inward glance as an adventure in self-effacement not self infatuation. He was a charming and perceptive critic of his own foibles, especially alert to his weakness for inconsistency.
Danny Heitman
The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.
Chris Hedges
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.
George Orwell
Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.
John Hersey
As the doctors told him, he wanted to scream out loud and cry. He held his heavy head up and clenched his teeth and fists. “Men don’t cry,” his grandpa used to say. “Men don’t cry.” �8But he cried. Like a baby. He cried till he could feel cracks in his heart as he breathed. He cried till he knew he would never love again.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
Nancy Banks-Smith
Freedom - that word that the human spirit feeds: that no one can explain, and anyone who does not understand.
Cecília Meireles
They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.
Chris Hedges
There's no room for hate and violence in this world. We must learn to be more kind, compassionate, empathetic, and sympathetic to humanity.
Germany Kent
Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.
Gloria Steinem
He speaks English with the flawless imperfection of a New Yorker.
Gilbert Millstein
At the very moment when people underestimate you is when you can make a breakthrough.
Germany Kent
I guess the lesson is you can’t go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.
Charles Finch
When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance.
Douglas A. Blackmon
The reason they don't ask me when they're having kids, of course, is because men can, pretty much, carry on a normal life once they've had a baby.
Caitlin Moran
Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.
Flora Rheta Schreiber
Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
You don't feel thirty percent smarter when the stock goes up by thirty percent so when the stock goes down you shouldn't feel thirty percent dumber" Jeff Bezos
Brad Stone
Canadians are generally indistinguishable from Americans and the surest way of telling the two apart is to make the observation to a Canadian.
Richard Staines
War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
Karl Kraus
According to your holy book, every single Buddhist, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, follower of various minor traditions or sects, those who do not affiliate themselves with a religious tradition and the approximately 2.74 billion humans who have never had the 'privilege' of hearing the word of your Messiah will be sentenced to eternal damnation in a lake of fire—regardless of moral standings or positive worldly accomplishments. If this sounds like a fair proposition to you, then I bite my tongue—but I honestly believe that the majority of Christians do not agree with these doctrinal assertions, and instead categorize themselves as 'Christians' out of cultural familiarity or perhaps out of complete ignorance in regards to the topic.
David G. McAfee
After all, the lies did serve to keep something from somebody, and the somebody was us.
Jerome Doolittle
August was nearly over - the month of apples and falling stars, the last care-free month for the school children. The days were not hot, but sunny and limpidly clear - the first sign of advancing autumn.
Victor Nekrasov
In those days, there was no money to buy books.
Ernest Hemingway
Einstein's secretary once said that if Einstein were born among the polar bears, he would still be Einstein. But unless polar bears were well versed in theoretical physics, that is not true. Einstein would not be Einstein. Which is not to take anything away from Einstein, or the polar bears, but simply to point out that he was part of a creative ecology, and trying to isolate him from it is not only silly but futile.
Eric Weiner
The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker.
Lafcadio Hearn
Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.
Walter Cronkite
Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.
Michael Pollan
But I supposed love doesn't stop, even in wars.
Monica Hesse
I loved him with a passion of which I had no idea I was capable. I loved him partly to defend him against the world and partly because I genuinely believed we were soul mates.
Clare Balding
A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
Walter Lippmann
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
Malcolm Muggeridge