Quotes by Journalists - Page 48

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
Christopher Morley
Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer
Mark Kurlansky
Keep expecting and believing that your due season is coming. Declare that the good you have harvested in your life will manifest.
Germany Kent
How unfortunate is the guy who does not live in the extravagant memory of an infatuated young woman.
Manu Joseph
[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet
George Orwell
Their [plant secondary compounds] healthful effects in humans, however, are not well understood, in part because things in nature like coriander and basil can't be patented so there isn't a lot of money being thrown at them, and in part because long-term studies that measure small effects of low doses are expensive and don't yield the kind of unambiguous, major effects you get with pharmaceuticals, but mainly because preventions are never as exciting as cures.
Mark Schatzker
In other words, the Bannonite belief in disruption as an end in itself renders impossible any self-scrutiny or acknowledgment of error, in a kind of endless feedback loop (the consequences of which could become much more dire over time). And it is precisely the Bannonite contempt for procedural and institutional knowledge that is partly responsible for creating all of the logistical and legal problems to begin with.
Greg Sargent
Americanism in all its forms seemed to be trashy and wasteful and crude, even brutal. There was a metaphor ready to hand in my native Hampshire. Until some time after the war, the squirrels of England had been red. I can still vaguely remember these sweet Beatrix Potter–type creatures, smaller and prettier and more agile and lacking the rat-like features that disclose themselves when you get close to a gray squirrel. These latter riffraff, once imported from America by some kind of regrettable accident, had escaped from captivity and gradually massacred and driven out the more demure and refined English breed. It was said that the gray squirrels didn't fight fair and would with a raking motion of their back paws castrate the luckless red ones. Whatever the truth of that, the sighting of a native English squirrel was soon to be a rarity, confined to the north of Scotland and the Isle of Wight, and this seemed to be emblematic, for the anxious lower middle class, of a more general massification and de-gentrification and, well, Americanization of everything.
Christopher Hitchens
Some mistakes... Just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you. You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.
Jojo Moyes
Living and struggling, for others, is a great and dignified life. Whereas, living for oneself exhibits just egocentric and own importance, since mostly falls under it.
Ehsan Sehgal
In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.
Barbara Ehrenreich
He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.
John Howard Griffin
You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does.
Mitch Albom
The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparing for a foul shot, the tennis player at set point over his opponent--all of them savoring a moment before committing themselves to action.
George Plimpton
Plus, in one of his e-mails, the guy said he didn't like pancakes. What kind of asshole doesn't like pancakes?
A.J. Jacobs
your moods and colors are my climate, not the changing face of the sky
John Geddes
Having commodified nature, we're eating the shrapnel of a worldwide homogeneity bomb.
Adam Leith Gollner
It’s necessary that everyone does his duty and works in his place - devotes himself to constructing a body of fundamental values - against the common enemy - in a network of active, supple, inderdependent, and confederated resistance - present on every front, at the level of Europe - with the aim of concentrating all the energies of the combatants.
Guillaume Faye
When your heart is heavy, sometimes it's just easier to retweet the words of another person who seems to know exactly how you feel.
Germany Kent
...the reward centers of the brain--where the pleasure of those high-calorie foods registers--also respond to other substances that bring about pleasure....But those reward centers also respond to other gratifying things, like watching a sunset or experiencing a loving touch...So while you may not be able to change the wiring in your brain, you can "feed" those reward centers other pleasures...Biology isn't destiny when you have effective strategies...
Bob Greene
They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it.
Albert Camus
I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
Ernest Hemingway
Anyway, they went and built this silly housing project, with us living right across the street from it. Some of the children from the housing project got into trouble. You can't just take people who don't have anything, don't know what they're doing, pack them in a bunch of buildings, and expect it's going to all work out somehow.- Sadie
Amy Hill Hearth
A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening -- as the five of us did -- it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. [1971]
John McPhee
Peace is always beautiful.
Walt Whitman
Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.
Jonathan Rauch
I felt the mood shift. And, for no reason at all other than that he didn’t expect it, I climbed fully clothed into the bath and kissed him as he laughed and spluttered. I was suddenly glad of his solidity in a world where it was so easy to fall.
Jojo Moyes
And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.
Caitlin Moran
Love each other or perish
Mitch Album
...you want the sweetness of our beginning without the bitterness of our struggle - what are you asking - do you want light without shadow? ...
John Geddes
We hear about Tiger Woods as a prodigy at three years old. For every Tiger Woods, there are thousands of kids who never want to touch a golf club again.
Michael Sokolove
I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn’t get him anything other than a living.
Mark Helprin
It was too late for he and his father to have an adventure, and NOTHING seemed to have any color anymore.
Robert Kurson
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.
Albert Camus
Only other people can make you feel real.
Lauren Beukes
Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in.
Allison Pearson
So, without telling any of my Zen-snob buddies, I liked to pretend everything was the Pure Land, that my life was already perfect as it was.
Jaimal Yogis
Wal-Mart's business in the United States is stagnating, growing only because the company continues to relentlessly open new stores. But if Wal-Mart takes environmental responsibility seriously, if its stores become models for energy conservation and for doing minimal environmental harm (they are known for the opposite right now), that will be pioneering, and it might also be attractive to some Americans who have avoided Wal-Mart. If those stores are filled with products made by factory workers who are treated in a civilized fashion, products that do not damage the environment in the course of being made, products made in sustainable ways with minimal packaging,that will represent a pivot point, not just for Wal-Mart, or for retailing, but for capitalism. Nothing could do more to jump-start Wal-Mart's business than for Wal-Mart to find its soul.And of course, Wal-Mart's scale means that if it starts to take the design of its buildings and the impact of its products seriously, all its competitors will have no choice but to do the same. The virtuous Wal-Mart effect would ripple widely. It would ripple around the world.
Charles Fishman
This is the kind of corruption we understand, the corruption of the petty clerk writ large, and so this is the kind of corruption we look for. This is the kind of guilt we expect and understand: personal, targeted, involving suitcases. We really need suitcases.
Mihir S. Sharma
We have entered the Age of Light. The ages of steam and coal are long gone. With oil clinging to power, light is emerging as our deus ex machine. Light goes where nothing else can, gets there faster than anything else could, and brings back the images. If there are limits to light, other than its cosmic speed limit, we have not tested them. If there is a final answer to the question "What is light?" we have not found it.
Bruce Watson
I do not like to think too much on this Africa. It is too large and too empty,” he said. “People like De Buys, they astonish me with their courage – or perhaps it is a lack in them; they cannot imagine. I think that is one way to be not afraid: in a covered wagon looking at the piece of the horizon your mind can hold, and do not suffer thoughts about endless lands and unknowable things.
Claire Robertson
The best client is a scared millionaire.
H.L. Mencken
How can you cry for others’ struggles when you are facilitating mayhem in your own land?
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: "Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.
George F. Will
In true courage there is always an element of choice of an ethical choice and of anguish and also of action and deed. There is always a flame of spirit in it a vision of some necessity higher than oneself.
Brenda Ueland
Ambition is the capacity for unhappiness.
Manu Joseph
In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim.
Linton Weeks
The human being who lives only for himself finally reaps nothing but unhappiness. Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles satisfies. Don't put off the joy derivable from doing helpful kindly things for others.
B.C. Forbes
Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched—just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance—so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Thosewho lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.
Albert Camus
My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.
Marya Hornbacher
Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.
Christopher Hitchens
Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don't you think? I mean if you enjoy it.
Peter Heller
What she had realized was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.
Stieg Larsson
Named Harris," Bill said. "Ever know him, Mike? He was in the war, too.""Fortunate fellow," Mike said. "What times we had. How I wish those dear days were back.
Ernest Hemingway
The world is made up of two classes - the hunters and the huntees.
Richard Connell
The press has the power to stimulate people to clean up the environment prevent nuclear proliferation force crooked politicians out of office reduce poverty provide quality health care for all people and even to save the lives of millions of people as it did in Ethiopia in 1984. But instead we are using it to promote sex violence and sensationalism and to line the pockets of already wealthy media moguls.’ Dr Carl Jensen founder of Project Censored
Ian Hargreaves
We are such idiots, We think everyone else has it all figured out. But we're all stumbling around in dark rooms bumping into furniture and stifling our cries so no one will know.
Joan Ryan
Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.
Leslie T. Chang
Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on.
Caitlin Moran
To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.
Cameron Conaway