Quotes by Journalists - Page 196

Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.
Richard Brookhiser
Love isn't all sparks and firecrackers. Sometimes it’s more subtle than that.
Becky Wicks
It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word "travel" is derived from "travail " denoting the pains of childbirth.
Jessica Mitford
Just as books are read one word at a time, roads are taken one step at a time.
Xinran
A lie doesn't become dangerous only with exposure; it is toxic, however well buried.
Decca Aitkenhead
Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses — the days of interviews — are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.
Janet Malcolm
In both cases, it is the prejudice, not the condition, that does the harm. It may be, as some would have it, that blacks are inherently inferior to whites or that homosexuals are all, by definition, sick. So what? Even if either condition truly is inherently undesirable, no manner of social pressure will turn blacks into whites or gays into straights. Social pressure will only exaggerate the handicap. It is still the prejudice, more than the condition, that does the harm.
Andrew Tobias
Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.
Nick Joaquín
... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.
José Saramago
The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.
Ada Calhoun
As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.
Clive Thompson
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Walt Whitman
For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.
Sarah Vowell
The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.
Émile Zola
What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?
Christopher Hitchens
Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.
George F. Will
Abraham Lincoln did not shoot John Wilkes Booth. Titanic did not sink a North Atlantic iceberg. And Fox News is neither fair nor balanced. These are simple historical facts intelligible to all adults, most children, and some of your more discerning domesticated animals. But not... to Bill O
Keith Olbermann
Truth for him was a moving target he never aimed for the bull and rarely pierced the outer ring.
Hugh Cudlipp
Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man -in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.
Frank Chodorov
You can't prepare for everything life's going to throw at you. And you can't avoid danger. It's there. The world is a dangerous place, and if you sit around wringing your hands about it, you'll out on all the adventure.
Jeannette Walls
This is not something anyone can teach you. Heartbreak you must learn on your own.
Chelsey Philpot
...life is extremely resilient but not infinitely so.
Eizabeth Kolbert
Religion should be subject to commonsense appraisal and rational review, as openly discussible as, say, politics, art and the weather. The First Amendment, we should recall, forbids Congress both from establishing laws designating a state religion and from abridging freedom of speech. There is no reason why we should shy away from speaking freely about religion, no reason why it should be thought impolite to debate it, especially when, as so often happens, religious folk bring it up on their own and try to impose it on others.
Jeffrey Tayler
Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
H.L. Mencken
You wouldn’t believethe sun had ever shone on this heart.
Antonio Cisneros
Today if anything is trying to hold you back, give no attention to it. Get your hopes up, get your faith up, look up, and get ready to rise up.
Germany Kent
The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.
Henry Hazlitt
t tMonsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.
Andrew Sullivan
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
Environment is what you make it and destiny is how you react to your environment: whether you try to overcome it or just resign yourself to it.
Nick Joaquín
But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.
Anna Quindlen
There are 2-3 millions prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
One cat just leads to another."[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]
Ernest Hemingway
You don't spread democracy with a barrel of a gun.
Helen Thomas
I have worked all my life wanted to work all my life needed to work all my life.
Liz Carpenter
He was pitching to me before I could walk. He gave me wooden bat before my mother let me use scissors. He said I could make the major leagues one day if I had "a plan," and if I "stuck to the plan"Of course, when you're that young, you nest in your parents' plans, not your own.
Mitch Albom
It wasn't even a fight, really. We didn't shout. We barely even argued, but a snake of tension quietly slithered into our lives.
Gayle Forman
[I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do.
Christine Kenneally
well I believe in commitment it's just I, you know, I don't stick to it.
Jim Lewis
What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace with it you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.
Max Lerner
Nothing in fine print is ever good news.
Andy Rooney
For every hour a mother gets to herself, a father will demand five times that amount for drinking with friends and acting like an immature dipshit.
Drew Magary
CAIR is still trying to promote its strange claim that criticism of its ideology is racist....The ridiculous claims that criticism of Islam is an act of bigotry fail to take into account the fact that former Muslims like Bosch, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Firoozeh Bazrafkan have been some of the sharpest critics of the ideology. Did they also change races?
Daniel Greenfield
A study of the San Francisco Beat enclave by psychiatrist Dr. Francis Rigney in the late 1950's showed 60 percent "were so psychotic or crippled by tensions, anxiety and neurosis as to be nonfunctional in the competitive world." In contrast, the several studies released so far made of the student radicals at Berkeley show them to be stable, serious, and of above-average intelligence. The point is that the Beats had to "cop out" of the Rat Race because they couldn't perform; the New Left chooses to reject a society it could easily be successful in.
Jack Newfield
My whole life had split in two: Smith and not Smith. I liked the Smith parts of it so much better.
Sarra Manning
People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument...He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.
Malcolm Muggeridge
You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.
Jeannette Walls
The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
George Orwell
Next time, can you ask him to bring cookies? I don't like to put up with that level of insane unless there's some kind of high-calorie compensation.
Lauren Beukes
That night in Cartagena he again requested the songs of his youth, some so old he had to teach them to Iturbide, who was too young to remember them. The audience slipped away as the General bled inside, and he was left alone with Iturbide beside the embers.
Gabriel García Márquez
the heart aches through nights—the broken places of neglect
John Geddes
Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.
Ian Fleming
There is only one class of men, the privileged class
Albert Camus
The words he said, too, must be human enough to bleed.
Cameron Conaway
I am afraid of sex as sex is defined by the dominant culture, as practiced all around me, and projected onto magazine pages, billboards, and movie screens. I am afraid of sex because I am afraid of domination, cruelty, violence, and death. I am afraid of sex because sex has hurt me and hurt lots of people I know, and because I have hurt others with sex in the past. I know that there are people out there who have been hurt by sex in ways that are beyond words, who have experienced a depth of pain that I will never fully understand. And I know there are people who are dead because of sex. Yes, I am afraid of sex. How could I not be?
Robert Jensen
Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.
Lev Grossman
Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.
Aljean Harmetz
One day spent with someone you love can change everything.
Mitch Albom
By the 1980's and 1990's, Moore's Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The "law" said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you're not running on what became known as " Internet time," you're falling behind.
John Markoff