Quotes by Journalists - Page 37

...words are so strong and I am so timid - my soul ignores warnings and I end up covered with your paint ...
John Geddes
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.
George Orwell
Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.
Rose Wilder Lane
Be faithful, be vigilant, be untiring in your efforts to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free. Come what may - cost what it may - inscribe on the banner which you unfurl to the breeze, as your religious and political motto - "NO COMPROMISE WITH SLAVERY! NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS
William Lloyd Garrison
Don’t tell me you have OCD about this?”“OCD, ADHD—pretty sure if they come up with some new acronym tomorrow I’d have it.
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
A sentence which might bear in mind that our great struggle is that of fear, and that if a man has killed compulsively, it is because he was extremely frightened. Above all, a justice which might examine itself, & recognize that all of us, a living quagmire, founded in darkness, & for this reason not a man's evil should be cosigned to another man's evil: so that the latter may not shoot to kill without restraint or censure. A justice which will not forget that we are all dangerous, & that at the hour when the executant of justice kills, he is no longer protecting us or seeking to eliminate a criminal; he is committing his own crime, which he has been harboring for a considerable time. At the hour of killing a criminal- at that very moment, an innocent man is being put to death. No, no, I am not asking for the sublime, nor for the things which gradually become the words which help me to sleep peacefully. Those of us who take refuge in the abstract are a mixture of forgiveness & vague charity. What I want is something much harsher & much more difficult: I want the terrestrial.
Clarice Lispector
Her anger was rekindled.'You see, I keep it to myself, but, oh! it's more than I can stand. Don't say anything, sir; don't say anything , or I'll explode!'He said nothing, and she exploded all the same.
Émile Zola
Time and time again one has seen, even in people not particularly given to reflection, that the best way of finding a solution is to let one’s thoughts drift until the right moment comes to pounce, like a tiger taking its prey by surprise.
José Saramago
It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
Lev Grossman
Humanities are the instructors of enchantment.
David Brooks
She noticed then that Conor was watching her.'Are you going for a swim?' he asked her.'In a while. Why don't you go down and check if it's warm enough?''And if it's not warm enough?''We'll still go in. But at least we'll know.
Colm Tóibín
That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
We move much too fast, and too frequently, to pause to savor landscapes or avoid disfiguring clutter.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr.
I believe that within every one of us is a woman of undiscovered beauty, a woman who is charming and talented and light of heart
Sarah Strohmeyer
Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.
Tom Bissell
The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical.
Ian Fleming
Cohen testified that there was no 'direct relationship' linking heart disease to dietary fats, and that he had been able to induce the same blood-vessel complications seen in heart disease merely by feeding sugar to his laboratory rats. Peter Cleave testified to his belief that the problem extended to all refined carbohydrates. 'I don't hold the cholesterol view for a moment,' Cleave said, noting that mankind had been eating saturated fats for hundreds of thousands of years. 'For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life... but, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up... that is a very different proposition.
Gary Taubes
There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.
Scott Douglas
Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals.
Winifred Gallagher
He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.
Hunter S. Thompson
We are fossil fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that's not realistic. I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it's best to think of natural gas like methadone. It's a way for an energy addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps.
Russell Gold
The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.
Christopher Hitchens
To say that an idea is fashionable is to say I think that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.
Murray Kempton
But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune.
Zoë Heller
Heschel calls the Sabbath a cathedral in time.
Judith Shulevitz
...The coarse rhetoric and reduction of women to violently empty reproductive organs isn't a great way to argue against Trump's vulgarity. The unhinged rhetoric, violent anti-speech street protests,and hysteria currently on display don't make Trump look like he's a unique threat.
Mollie Hemingway
Real life this fdar had taught me that in the adult world, fate was chaotic and uncertain. Guidelines for success were arbitrary. But in the world of D&D, at least there was a rule book... By role-playing, we were in control, and our characters... wandered through places of danger, their destinies, ostensibly, within our grasp.
Ethan Gilsdorf
In the Empire, the Scholars are not allowed to read and, like so many bullies and power-seekers who hide behind ideologies to justify the terrible things they do, their oppressors wear masks. 'An Ember in the Ashes' suggests that such masks (literal or figurative) don’t work. Not forever, anyway. Masks only cover faces. It’s actions that show who we are.
Chelsey Philpot
Don't get hung up on a snag in the stream my dear. Snags are not so dangerous-it's the debris that clings to them that makes the trouble. Pull yourself loose and go on.
Anne Shannon Monroe
An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
Tom Bissell
It felt like one of those movies where a bunch of misfits, each gifted in his own way - one in explosives, another in disguise, another in forgery or karate- are thrown together to achieve a dangerous mission.
Philip Delves Broughton
[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.
Tahir Shah
Do not be surprised,' she said. 'It is I, and it is not I; You shall find me again, and you shall lose me; Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me; And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.
Marcel Schwob
Christian: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbour.
Ambrose Bierce
Life is seldom as unendurable as to judge by the facts it logically ought to be.
Brooks Atkinson
Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?
Barbara Ehrenreich
See appendix A for a proof that Winston Churchill was a carrot.
Charles Seife
Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.
Matt Haig
Alice knows those stories. The routiers and condottieri of the Free Companies, who fight the wars of whichever prince will pay their fees, and amuse themselves in between times, are said to commit every kind of crime: from eating meat in Lent to slitting open pregnant women to kill their unborn and unbaptised children. The countryside of the southern lands is supposed to be full of their victims: a sea of vagabonds - priests without parishes; destitute peasants; artisans looking for work. ‘So you’, Alice says, ‘were one of the famous sons of iniquity…’ The Pope calls them that when they rob churches. But the Pope also uses them regularly. Alice knows she sounds a little breathless. She can’t altogether keep the admiration out of her voice. If she’d been a man, she thinks, she might have done exactly the same thing as Wat, to better herself fast.
Vanora Bennett
Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.
Barbara Ehrenreich
It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.
Masha Gessen
the abyss you stare into and that stares back at you is your reflection in the mirror - we all have it - that shadow self - that dark heart...
John Geddes
When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.
David Halberstam
Maybe there in a set amount of crying your body needs to deal with any trauma. There’s a certain water-level of tears you need to shed until you can find acceptance or move on or whatever. And, if you don’t cry them out, they just catch up with you.
Holly Bourne
From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.
Jack London
As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had.
Jeannette Walls
He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.
David Halberstam
I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.
Katherine Anne Porter
I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.
Cory Doctorow
I have not spent my time studying the problem of "race"—"race" itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard—usually believing himself white—proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same "race." But a great number of "black" people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead "races" (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,They scorn the best I can do to relate them.
Walt Whitman
At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach—it is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.
Sydney J. Harris
George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'.
Gideon Haigh
The clitoris not only applauds when a women flaunts her mastery; it will give a standing ovation. In the multiple orgasm, we see the finest evidence that our lady Klitoris helps those who help themselves. It may take many minutes to reach the first summit, but once there the lusty mountaineer finds wings awaiting her. She does noy need to scramble back to the ground before scaling the next peak, but can glide like a raptor on currents of joy.
Natalie Angier
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
H.L. Mencken
And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer.
George Orwell
Because fear called her by her name. (Her own name, not fear’s name. Fear doesn’t have a name; it’s just the steady beat underneath a smile.)
Luisa Valenzuela
Do not allow me to forget you
Gabriel García Márquez
Don't let other people's limitations limit you. Go for what you really want ... You just might get it!
Sheri Fink
I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.
Ernest Hemingway