Quotes by Journalists - Page 44

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
Christopher Morley
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303
Lionel Shriver
...goodness is not the absence of evil - it's the light that pushes back the darkness...
John Geddes
Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great extent on the imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus, he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system:
Paul Johnson
Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate appease bribe seduce bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
Walter Lippman
let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to him, whose wisdom is infinite.
Amin Maalouf
I run my finger along the crease of the envelope, feel the weight of history inside. Wherever I'm going next, these are coming with me.
Gayle Forman
[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?
Jon Ronson
The pens sharpen – Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same – Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies.
Polly Toynbee
Mass media has convinced us to think that silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase “We just don’t talk anymore”).
Chuck Klosterman
Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
Anna Quindlen
You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
Mitch Albom
But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.
J.M. Ledgard
The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.
Naomi Klein
Snowmageddon.Dirty glacial clouds hammered the city's anvil. On the District of Columbia’s northwestern edge, gusts of snow rolled across the Park Road Bridge like volcanic ash.
Simon Conway
There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth.
Mark Kurlansky
She heard Piers give an excited little cry and someone gave an excited little cry in return, and Grace Vaughn appeared in the open doorway, laden down with garment bags.For one fleeting moment, Ellie saw both husband and wife’s faces light up before they resembled their usual expressions – a scowl and a pout respectively.
Sarra Manning
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
Walt Whitman
Kurzes Glück kann jeder.
Kurt Tucholsky
-I'm going to heaven! I replied.-What do you mean, you're going to heaven?-Let me pass.-And what will you do in heaven, my poor child?-I'm going there to kill God, who killed Daddy.
Tom Reiss
Maybe what stopped people from voting wasn't a lack of information about the candidates or a feeling that the outcomes of races didn't matter or a sense that a trip to the polls was inconvenient. What if voting wasn't only a political act, but a social one that took place in a liminal space between the public and private that had never been well-defined to citizens? What if toying with those expectations was key to turning a person into a voter? What if elections were simply less about shaping people's opinions than changing their behaviors?
Sasha Issenberg
Time is a circus always packing up and moving away.
Ben Hecht
The swaggering underemphasis of New England.
Heywood Broun
As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code.
Tahir Shah
Theodore you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. I am giving you the tools, but it is up to you to make your body.
Candice Millard
Because if indestructible is every atom of a speck of dust, so must be immortal the spirit of a man. And if every wave of the wind creates eternity, so must the consequences of our acts. So every one of us would leave on a big Hajj to our Creator.
Osyp Nazaruk
The best reason why monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government: the mass of mankind understand it and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.
Walter Bagehot
She was convinced the demonic pain she had suffered in her leg as a child had been in some sort of preparation for the accident. Engraved in her memory was how she had been left speechless by the first attack. She had yet to accept that pain cannot be expressed in words but only in inarticulate screams. It took time before she could put brush to canvas, and still more time before she could paint pictures that screamed. In place of the screams themselves. In place of verbal descriptions. She owed it to her father, she thought, to the frantic look in his eyes which she would never forget, and to his words: 'Tell me, tell me!
Slavenka Drakulić
In the first place , I was removed from all the wickedness of the world here. I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the pride of life. I had nothing to covet; for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying.
Daniel Defoe
Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world ... a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing ... we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man.” This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world’s leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent.
Algis Valiunas
Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
George Orwell
It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.
Richard Brookhiser
Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.
Frank Herbert
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Nate Silver
Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow.
Tom Wolfe
This is a place of true imagination.
Rene Denfeld
Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking- glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what are you? damn you! And are you going to make good?
Jack London
The rhythm of solitude, once so intimidating, began to feel comfortable. Aloneness, I was learning, does not have to equal loneliness.
John Grogan
I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.
Albert Camus
If you want to give yourself a fair chance to succeed, never expect too much too soon
Po Bronson
Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.
Michael Pollan
Do you prefer Mitch? Or is Mitchell better?'.. .. Mitch, I say. Mitch is what my friends called me. 'Well, Mitch it is then,' Morrie says, as if closing a deal. 'And, Mitch?' Yes? 'I hope one day you will think of me as your friend.
Mitch Albom
...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.
Italo Calvino
Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.
Laura Miller
Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved people shrug.
Nicholas D. Kristof
No one will shake my conviction that those leaders of men, who are in the nature of carbuncles, of semi-conscious abscesses, who draw feverish crowds to them like noxious humours, have an innate knowledge of arrested time. They play with those vacant moments as though at a game of chequers. A fraction of suspended, frozen time, of inert time, jammed like a wedge into the most wonderfully oiled cogs of the most lucid of minds: and the whole mechanism is brought crashing to the ground, prepared to accept any authority, to endorse the most monstrous aberrations, especially collective ones.
Jacques Yonnet
We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.
Norman Mailer
When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.
Émile Zola
How many millions there are who don't want to go to Hell, but they don't want to get off the road to Hell.
Alan Cairns
Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.
Geraldine Brooks
It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong
Derek Thompson
The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.
Jacob A. Riis
With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig.
Italo Calvino
You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
Lev Grossman
I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.
George Plimpton
Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
David Quammen
He was a consummate politician-- which is to say he was given to expedient speech and lacked even a vestigial spine.
Nick Taylor
The only way you're going to reach places you've never gone is if you trust God's direction to do things you've never done.
Germany Kent
He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
Albert Camus
To watch. To wait. To wonder at a world in chaos,' the girl said. 'And hope one day you fools might learn.
David Hewson