Quotes by Journalists - Page 60

The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse doesn’t happen - that it is our illicit desires that drive us crazy. A century ago, Freud recoiled from his own theory of the sexual seduction of children and projected the problem back into the patient. He claimed in his Aetiology of Hysteria that clients, typically women, were describing their fantasies, not facts, not ‘real events’. P3
Beatrix Campbell
My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning.Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
Vasily Grossman
You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship
Mitch Albom
I think you have more fun as a human being even though it is much more painful.
Ernest Hemingway
No matter whom I'm with I'll always be alone," she said. And she added with a roguish touch: "Excellency.
Gabriel García Márquez
Nothing is more dangerous than a place of safety.
Robert Ferrigno
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
James Fenton
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other industrialized nation... meaning that we could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.
Michael Pollan
... understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.
James Agee
[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet.... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way--on their own terms.
George Packer
Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.
Hal Borland
We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.
Heinrich Heine
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
Christopher Morley
The greatest regret of my military career was as Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, he later wrote of the decision he made. I lost 169 soldiers during that year-long deployment. However, the monument we erected at Fort Hood, Texas, in memoriam lists 168 names. I approved the request of others not to include the name of the one soldier who committed suicide. I deeply regret my decision.
David Finkel
my soul has shadows – nooks and crannies where griefs, like cobwebs, collect
John Geddes
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
George Orwell
Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
Walt Whitman
People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.
Frank Herbert
Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
Marya Hornbacher
In a world of seven billion people, where every inch of land has been mapped, much of it developed, and too much of it destroyed, the sea remains the final unseen, untouched, and undiscovered wilderness, the planet’s last great frontier. There are no mobile phones down there, no e-mails, no tweeting, no twerking, no car keys to lose, no terrorist threats, no birthdays to forget, no penalties for late credit card payments, and no dog shit to step in before a job interview. All the stress, noise, and distractions of life are left at the surface. The ocean is the last truly quiet place on Earth.
James Nestor
In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.
Jerry Pinto
I think laughter may be a form of courage. As humans we sometimes stand tall and look into the sun and laugh, and I think we are never more brave than when we do that.
Linda Ellerbee
The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.
George F. Will
He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure---the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.
Ian Fleming
Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.
David Halberstam
its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent
Mark O'Connell
The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions.
Alexander Chase
Modernity kills ghostly romance("The Undying Thing")
Barry Pain
The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where four million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam to-day, and the savage progeny of our loins, with prehistoric weapons, defend themselves against the fanged despoilers. Think of it! And all because of the Scarlet Death—
Jack London
Once again, it is difficult to start from the premise of mindless evolution and end with the idea that humans are anything more than organisms bent on preserving and passing on their DNA. The fact that humans not only pursue art, philosophy, and science, but also exult in those things more than reproduction cannot easily be explained through materialism.
Joel Furches
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
[She] had occasionally glimpsed a series of interchangeable well-groomed blondes accompanying him to work events, then Grace had rocked up with her funny-coloured hair and her funny-coloured tights, and Vaughn had been smitten. Well, as smitten as Vaughn could be.
Sarra Manning
Out of every fruition of success no matter what comes forth something to make a new effort necessary.
Walt Whitman
Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare.
Lance Morrow
motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.
Frank Herbert
When there is no news, we will give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.
David Brinkley
Positive thinking is powerful thinking. If you want happiness, fulfillment, success and inner peace, start thinking you have the power to achieve those things. Focus on the bright side of life and expect positive results.
Germany Kent
Author says the ineffectual U.S. Navy of two centuries ago lost two thirds as many men to duelist bullets as to sea hazards.
Joseph Wheelan
Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom.
Arthur Koestler
In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.
Lionel Shriver
silence is not weakness and decency is not pride
Arthur Machen
Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.
Hunter S. Thompson
There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.
José Saramago
..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
José Saramago
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good true and serious.
Brenda Ueland
...I recall that day on the beach - the sand so brilliant, the clouds so massive, and the wind punishing your hair...
John Geddes
Joni Mitchell had it right: "They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot." But perhaps, in the near future, we could add a line of hopeful epilogue to that song: then they tore down the parking lot / and raised up a paradise
Richard Louv
Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
Tom Hodgkinson
Galaxies of nothing are going onin her eyes.
Caitlin Moran
If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
Barbara Ehrenreich
This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.
Émile Zola
Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but...Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)
Christopher Hitchens
Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.
Edward Humes
Sometimes, the way around prejudice is education.
Liza Mundy
Then I made her understand that, where she was concerned, I was only a poor dog, ready to die for her. But that she could marry the young man she pleased because she had cried with me, and mingled her tears with mine. ~ Erik
Gaston Leroux
It did not occur to me that absence of human companionship does not assure solitude. It may, on the contrary, plunge one into an environment compared with which New York or London would appear deserts. For we take memory and imagination with us. The seabirds that scream overhead or waddle along the margins of the surf; the grotesque forms of twisted cedars; the rustle of sea-grass in the wind; the interminable percussion of the breakers; the dead infinity of the sand itself - there can be no solitude, in the sense of freedom from disturbances of thought, in the presence of such things. They draw us back into the maelstrom. ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke
In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools.
Helen Brown