Quotes by Journalists - Page 208

Only with steadfast memories can we now be strong so as to undo the mistakes of the past, to begin anew and build from the rubble of their betrayal...
F. Sionil Jose'
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.
Frank Herbert
You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, ‘And are the men doing this, as well?’ If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit’.
Caitlin Moran
Some people think 1963's a long time ago; when a dead American in the jungle was an event, a grim thrilling novelty. It was spookwar then, adventure; not exactly soldiers, not even advisors yet, but Irregulars, working in remote places with little direct authority, acting out their fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know.
Michael Herr
People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015
David Brooks
People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, we cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth. Sacrifice - of nature, of the interests of others, even of our earlier selves - appears to be an inescapable part of our condition, the unavoidable price of all our achievements. A successful ritual is one that addresses both aspects of our predicament, recalling us to the shamefulness of our deeds at the same time it celebrates what the poet Frederick Turner calls "the beauty we have paid for with our shame." Without the double awareness pricked by such rituals, people are liable to find themselves either plundering the earth without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it's not surprising that most of us today bring one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature.
Michael Pollan
American culture at large has failed working mothers.
Emily Matchar
There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there's a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler's head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.
Chris L. Hayes
(Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)
William T. Vollmann
I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts. (Edward Curtis)
Timothy Egan
We can change in one day. We can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in one day.
Gayle Forman
You have to change your thinking if you desire to have a future different from your present.
Germany Kent
No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.
Jane Jacobs
To begin cooking duck at one in the morning is one of the finest acts of madness that can be undertaken by a human being who is not mad.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That's part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good aggressive newspaper will become part of that something.
Ben Bradlee
To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope.
Adam Leith Gollner
In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright...
Tom Wolfe
Don't dream to lead the people while you can't care, even about your neighbours.
Ehsan Sehgal
And yet, for the fully modern being, not being able to tweet or otherwise " share" - feelings, opinions, thoughts, jokes, links to cat videos or pictures of dinner - for even an hour is akin to eternal exile in the desert, and hence in part the rising tide of juror-caused mistrials across the planet.
Christie Blatchford
The cheese stands aloneThe cheese stands aloneHeigh-ho the merry-oThe cheese stands alone
Robert Cormier
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
Christopher Hitchens
What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?
Mitch Albom
Religion should be a basis for overcoming division, not for creating it.
Julia Suryakusuma
Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience— a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask.
Robert A. Caro
Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?
Christopher Hitchens
I feel like I failed," I said. "Don't beat yourself up," Jim said. "She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don't mean she turned out wrong.
Jeannette Walls
In a variation on James's recipe for interesting experience--the familiar leavened by the novel--Hobbs's "art of choosing difficulties" requires selecting projects that are "just manageable." If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. If it's too hard, you become anxious, overwhelmed, and unable to concentrate. Tellingly, one group is distinguished by its zeal for the kind of work that requires you to give it all you've got: high achievers particularly relish taking on risky projects that have only a 50/50 chance of success.
Winifred Gallagher
Terrorist', noun: 1. Someone my government tells me is a terrorist; 2. Someone my President decides to kill.
Glenn Greenwald
From a purely physical standpoint she didn't have a chance, but her attitude was that death was better than capitulation.
Stieg Larsson
[W]e need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.
Jon Ronson
He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.
Geraldine Brooks
...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.
Lionel Shriver
Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.
Arthur Koestler
If you wanted to bestow the grandiose title of "most successful organization in modern history," you would struggle to find a more obviously worthy nominee than the federal government of the United States.In its earliest stirrings, it established a lasting and influential democracy. Since then, it has helped defeat totalitarianism (more than once), established the world’s currency of choice, sent men to the moon, built the Internet, nurtured the world’s largest economy, financed medical research that saved millions of lives and welcomed eager immigrants from around the world.
David Leonhardt
It was hard to know what to make of the brothers' dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows.
Peter Biskind
Some delightful inscriptions are found in second-hand books. One, the most famous of all, may be found in every bookshop in the nation, repeated in a thousand and one volumes with only a single change of phrase in each. It is this: '______, with love from Momma.
Vincent Starrett
Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.
Robert Harris
Bond sat for a moment frozen to his chair. Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into his mind that most sinister line in poetry: 'They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings.
Ian Fleming
On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
There's nothing more narcissistic than being sure that you are built in the image of an all-powerful Creator-God, and that same God answers your prayers, knows your name, and has a personal relationship with you.
David G. McAfee
How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
Anna Quindlen
There is something inside all boys that drives us to go away again and again and again.
Andrew Smith
When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime.
Peter Brannen
My name is Richard Werner. Dick. You can call me Dick.
Ray Palla
I am ready. I have repented my sins and soon I will be in heaven with Christ my savior. Now I must die like a man.
Charles Portis
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
Christopher Morley
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, None has understood you, but I understand you, None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself, None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you, None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you, I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.
Walt Whitman
Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.
Peter Heller
Goals that are not frightening are not worth having.
Tina Brown
Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art
Dan Rather
Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.
George Orwell
One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.
H.L. Mencken
Together, on his back porch, his cigarette smoke rising like incense to the heavens, we spoke to the God of grace we both are so grateful to know up close and personal. It may be the most beautiful prayer I've ever heard. Jesus, for some reason you've given us another day, and you've set us in Narnia. There are people who still think it's frozen, and there are people who are longing to be thawed but don't know it. God, I pray that what you've called us to do would be the subversive work of the kingdom, that we would help participate in the melting of Narnia, and that people would come alive and would drink and dance and sing and just celebrate life in ways that are so marvelous that the world would press its face against the glass and see the redeemed celebrate life. Amen.
Cathleen Falsani
Please wait for me. Don't have all the fun now. Don't fill up on other people who aren't me. Don't ruin your appetite.
Caitlin Moran
O’Brien: How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?Winston: By making him suffer.O’Brien: Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred.
George Orwell
...I will find once again the light of your beauty - your colored windows in the night...
John Geddes
You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible
Jojo Moyes
Only God, my dear,” wrote Yeats blithely, “Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair.” This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines.
Naomi Wolf
But little else could deter Craig Binky, for he believed that everything about him was destined to be triumphal. Harry Penn was certain that in his nearly one hundred years he had never encountered a soul more intensely marinated in self-satisfaction. Craig Binky's pomposity was often relieved, for others, by what Harry Penn generously termed "Mr. Binky's somewhat inexact intelligence.
Mark Helprin
We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity. I am afraid. I will taste fear until I die.
Jerry Pournelle