Quotes by Journalists - Page 220

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
George Orwell
I do have a point to all this,” she continues. “There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we’re all your family.” She stops now. Leans over me so that the wisps of her hair tickle my face. She kisses me on the forehead. “You still have a family,” she whispers.
Gayle Forman
Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.
Will Self
What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
Frank Herbert
It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.
William A. Henry III
If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since.
Tom Hodgkinson
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
Walt Whitman
An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.
Dan Rather
Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent
Elizabeth Wurtzel
This is what you do when you journal. You are recording God’s grand, epoch-spanning redemptive story as it unfolds in your limited, temporal sphere of existence here on earth. Your journal has the potential to record the continuation of the Holy Spirit’s work in our world!
Adam L. Feldman
Love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises.
Charlie Jane Anders
The reefer butt is called a 'roach' because it resembles a cockroach… cockroach… cockroach…
Hunter S. Thompson
This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.
Gabriel García Márquez
... Gunpei Yokoi, asked his boss, 'What should I make?' Nintendo chief executive Hiroshi Yamauchi replied, 'Something great.'Game Over Nintendo's Battle to Dominate Videogames
David Sheff
The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.
David Brooks
There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
Walter Lippman
Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, “That would certainly make everything easier,” even though I can’t think of one person who’d qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson.
Chuck Klosterman
We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.
Gayle Forman
The biggest quality in successful people I think is an impatience with negative thinking. ... How many opportunities come along? If you wait for the right one that's wrong because it may never be right and what have you got to lose? Even if it's a disaster you've tried you've learned something you've had an adventure. And that doesn't mean you can't do it again.
Edward McCabe
I told him I had, perhaps, different notions of matrimony from what the received custom had given us of it; that I thought a woman was a free agent as well as a man, and was born free, and, could she manage herself suitably, might enjoy that liberty to as much purpose as the men do; that the laws of matrimony were indeed otherwise, and mankind at this time acted quite upon other principles, and those such that a woman gave herself entirely away from herself, in marriage, and capitulated, only to be, at best, but an upper servant, and from the time she took the man she was no better or worse than the servant among the Israelites, who had his ears bored—that is, nailed to the door-post—who by that act gave himself up to be a servant during life; that the very nature of the marriage contract was, in short, nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority, and everything to the man, and the woman was indeed a mere woman ever after—that is to say, a slave.
Daniel Defoe
Alone you're refinding a glittering, a clarity, you're finding your distilled self. ...You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.
Nikki Gemmell
If I stay. If I live. It’s up to me.All this business about medically induced comas is just doctor talk. It’s not up to the doctors. It’s not up to the absentee angels. It’s not even up to God who, if He exists, is nowhere around right now. It’s up to me.
Gayle Forman
The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
George Orwell
I'd been very influenced by what I'd seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there - and part of what we were lacking in our factory - was as sense of teamwork and discipline. If we didn't have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren't going to have the discipline to keep all those machines running.
Walter Isaacson
It will no longer be necessary to leave one's own home in order to find work in the surrounding districts, which means spending week after week away from home, for no matter how restless a fellow might be, his own home, if he has a wife he respects and children he loves, has the same satisfying taste as bread, a man's home is not for all hours, but he soon begins to miss it if he does not go back there every day.
José Saramago
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Walt Whitman
Being lucky in love might be less a matter of luck and more a matter of paying attention.
Sophia Dembling
In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library.
Caitlin Moran
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Malcolm Gladwell
We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.
Naomi Wolf
Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man.
Kang Chol-Hwan
He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?
Edward Humes
again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.
Italo Calvino
I had two speeds, which often varied with my blood alcohol level: fine with whatever, and never, ever satisfied. Where was the balance between these two?
Sarah Hepola
Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward's moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about 'The Chairman' was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father's Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. 'The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it's such a great idea, why isn't Said signing off on it?' When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. 'The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.' Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?
Christopher Hitchens
Your Monday morning thoughts set the tone for your whole week. See yourself getting stronger, and living a fulfilling, happier & healthier life.
Germany Kent
You can't stay here any more. My fears have been irrational and they've forced me to make unwise decisions and accept the unacceptable.
Dorothy Koomson
I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don't do shit. They do nothing, all night long. They sit in a recliner and watch TV. I've probably watched more television than anyone you've ever met, and I don't even own one. Terrible shows, good shows, Golf tournaments in Cancun. C-SPAN. Hours of Oprah. Law and Order. Lonely people love Law and Order, for whatever reason. They prefer the straight narratives. p60
Chuck Klosterman
The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame.
Christopher Hitchens
The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect. That’s actually a faster way to engage with what they’re getting at than to lob grenades in their direction…If you’re going to hold someone to what they believe, make sure you accurately represent what they believe.
Malcolm Gladwell
Why does a man take it for granted that a girl who flirts with him wants him to kiss her - when, nine times out of ten, she only wants him to want to kiss her?
Helen Rowland
As became a young sinner, Sam [Mark Twain] had a special interest in Satan. He asked his Sunday school teacher questions about Eve in the garden, wondering "if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber." Twain recalled, "He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension.
Fred Kaplan
In this world, this life, "flow" [the times when our work or play so absorbs and attunes our energies that we lose track of time] comes to an end. The canvas is dry, the fugue is complete, the band plays the tag one more time and then resolves on the final chord. And, too, the book is finished, the service is over, the lights go up in the darkened theater and we emerge blinking into the bright lights of the "real world." But what if the timeless, creative world we had glimpsed is really the real world -- and it is precisely its reality that gave it such power to captivate us for a while? What if our ultimate destiny is that moment of enjoyment and engagement we glimpse in the artist's studio?
Andy Crouch
The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the founders of the 1924 Soviet REvolution, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1920 through 1927- there are many trials such as these in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgement has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder.
Katherine Anne Porter
There are worse things than suffering and death... it is worse to lose one's self-respect.
Sándor Márai
For the happiest life days should be rigorously planned nights left open to chance.
Mignon McLaughlin
There is no such thing as death In nature nothing dies: From each sad moment of decay Some forms of life arise.
Charles Mackay
I can stomach just about anything… After all, I can deal with politicians… I don’t have any problem not puking on them! —Debra Wright, KNUT Reporter
Ray Palla
A journey of 1,000 miles starts with just 10 digits.
Gayle Forman
People are like birds - from a distance beautiful: from close up those sharp beaks those beady little eyes.
Richard J. Needham
...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
Jonah Lehrer
Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked.
Mark Kurlansky
Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.
Linda Ellerbee
Revealingly, the central function of the Constitution as law--the supreme law--was to impose limitations not on the behavior of ordinary citizens but on the federal government. The government, and those who ran it, were not placed outside the law, but expressly targeted by it. Indeed, the Bill of Rights is little more than a description of the lines that the most powerful political officials are barred from crossing, even if they have the power to do so and even when the majority of citizens might wish them to do so.
Glenn Greenwald
I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true.
Andy Rooney
Who is this man?''Chinaman, or rather half Chinese and half German. Got a daft name. Calls himself Doctor No - Doctor Julius No.''No? Spelt like Yes?''That's right.
Ian Fleming
After all Death is a Symbol that there was Life.
Mario Benedetti
There is danger in reckless change but greater danger in blind conservatism.
Henry George
But in terms of "psychological" time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by ancient grudges, controlled by obsolete prejudices, driven by buried fears.
Sydney J. Harris