Quotes by Journalists - Page 69

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.
Roy Blount Jr.
He who laughs last thinks slowest.
Troy Anderson
...at morning, I'm unruffled - I'll sit with my tea and Muse Cat beside me and listen to the soft chime of the grandfather clock...
John Geddes
How odd it is, that the dead weigh more than the living. You would think it would be the opposite, but it isn't. I think it is because souls give bodies lightness and air. When the soul leaves, the body has nothing left and is desperate to return to the earth. That's why it's so heavy.
Rene Denfeld
The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
Gabriel García Márquez
The neighbor's flock has taken advantage of the chaos, and I think that's pretty smart.
Jeanne Marie Laskas
Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.
Hunter S. Thompson
On a hike, the days pass with the wind, the sun, the stars; movement is powered by a belly full of food and water, not a noxious tankful of fossil fuels. On a hike, you're less a job title and more a human being....A periodic hike not only stretches the limbs but also reminds us: Wow, there's a big old world out there.
Ken Ilgunas
I'd be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn't believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don't think it does.
Andy Rooney
the worst thing we can do, the absolute worst, is to do nothing.
Fritz Gerlich
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?
Christopher Hitchens
Diligence and Application have their due Encouragement, even in the remotest Parts of the World, and that no Case can be so low, so despicable, or so empty of Prospect, but that an unwearied Industry will go a great way to deliver us from it, will in time raise the meanest Creature to appear again in the World, and give him a new Case for his Life.
Daniel Defoe
Ask nothing from your running, and you'll get more than you ever imagined!
Christopher McDougall
I often think about dogs when I think about work and retirement. There are many breeds of dog that just need to be working, and useful, or have a job of some kind, in order to be happy. Otherwise they are neurotically barking, scratching, or tearing up the sofa. A working dog needs to work. And I am a working dog.
Martha Sherrill
...true authority is not based on control - it's based on truth...
John Geddes
Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment.
Dan Harris
He's taking the change well?" She asked.Except for getting a bit overtired. He's excited, but what 15-year-old wouldn't be under these circumstances?
Frank Herbert
You must know that I am made of death, from head to foot, and it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!
Gaston Leroux
The biggest dog has been a pup.
Joaquin Miller
When you have a dream and someone makes promises they keep breaking, it is hard to recover. You lose hope.
Yasmine El Rashidi
The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable, multidimensional creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety, and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. The psyche becomes impossible to fully describe because there is nothing, including the process of describing it, that is not 'it' in action.
Paul Levy
At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.
Christopher Hitchens
Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shimmering like translucent curtains drawn over the windows of heaven, the northern lights suddenly streaked across a million miles of space to burst in silent explosions. Fountains of light, pale greens, reds, and yellows, showered the stars and geysered up to the center of the sky, where they pooled to form a multicolored sphere, a kind of mock sun that gave light but no heat, pulsing, flaring, and casting beams in all directions, horizon to horizon. Below, the wolves howled with midnight madness and the two young men stood in speechless awe. Even after the spectacle ended, the Aurora fading again to faint shimmer, they stood as silent and transfixed as the first human beings ever to behold the wonder of creation. Starkmann felt the diminishment that is not self-depreciation but humility; for what was he and what was Bonnie George? Flickers of consciousness imprisoned in lumps of dust; above them a sky ablaze with the Aurora, around them a wilderness where wolves sang savage arias to a frozen moon.
Philip Caputo
Because I seeA rainstorm in JuneJust before the sunThe black of nightJust before the starsAnd, girl, I see your ghostJust before our dawn
Laura Miller
The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun between ten men and an automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately one machine-gun between fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only procure them illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was the same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it is the same in all wars-always the same contrast between the sleek police in the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line.
George Orwell
With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.
Tahir Shah
If inanimate objects are left to stand in their world, and are not invited out to mingle with our sense of self, they will quietly console and delight us. But to bind possessions up closely with the mind is less than fair to both.
Kennedy Fraser
She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.
Mavis Gallant
The ecstasy of seeing her versus the agony of losing her, a million births and a million deaths.
David Whitehouse
It is more important to go slow and gain the lessons you need along the journey then to rush the process and arrive at your destination empty.
Germany Kent
A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays—when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?
George Orwell
It does no service to the cause of racial equality for white people to content themselves with judging themselves to be nonracist. Few people outside the clan or skinhead movements own up to all-out racism these days. White people must take the extra step. They must become anti-racist.
Clarence Page
The desert doesn't care who you are, and neither does anyone or anything who lives in it.
Deanne Stillman
For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.
Rebecca West
I swear to you the architects shall appear without fall, I swear to you they will understand you and justify you, The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses all and is faithful to all, He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall perceive that you are not an iota less than they, You shall be fully glorified in them.
Walt Whitman
If you wanted to know what a man was thinking, check the view from his favorite spot.
Robert Ferrigno
However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldn't recognize him anyway. There are those who say we're very fortunate that god chooses not to appear before us, because compared with the shock we would get were such a thing to happen, our fear of death would be mere child's play. Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just another one.
José Saramago
When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.
Vincent Starrett
It is terrible to be an unprotected being.
Colm Tóibín
Having to explain to a child of today, who has learned to swipe before they can speak, that certain aspects of a person’s life must remain private for the preservation of one’s sanity is almost frivolous.
Aysha Taryam
Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)
Max Hastings
We are so afraid of the idea of having to die… that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…
José Saramago
Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.
Tom Bissell
Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
Walter Isaacson
In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130.
Ian Fleming
Stuck in high school for the rest of my natural life. Talk about hell.
Cara Lynn Shultz
Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.
Christopher Hitchens
You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.
Sarah Vowell
When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.
Nicholas Kristof
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
Tahir Shah
We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.
Chuck Klosterman
Nothing between us was ever planned--not even you. We were both 24 years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage parents. With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we planned to marry. Marriage was presented to us as a shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and I knew too many people who'd married and abandoned each other for less. The truth of us was always that you were our ring. We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. Everything else was subordinate to this fact. If that sounds like a weight, it shouldn't. The truth is that I owe you everything I have. Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all because I was a young man, and not yet clear of my own human vulnerabilities. But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I go down now, I would not go down alone.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.
Cory Doctorow
The requirement to obey and acknowledge God and Jesus Christ has caused the teachings of the Christian tradition to stray from morality to idol worship,creating a world in which a murderer can be forgiven and sent to heaven, whereas a loving and caring skeptic would be cast into damnation.
David G. McAfee
One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.
Walter Isaacson
Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom.
Albert Camus
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.
Albert Camus
Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")
Algernon Blackwood
Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abru
Colm Tóibín
Peace: in international affairs a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Ambrose Bierce