Quotes by Journalists - Page 72

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.
H.L. Mencken
There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.
Adela Rogers St. John
John Lewis said, "You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine. So you don’t have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being. From time to time, we would discuss that, if you have someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person. Years ago that person was an innocent child, an innocent little baby. What happened? Did something go wrong? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? You try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don’t give up. You never give up on anyone.
Krista Tippett
I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?
Rene Denfeld
The more Wayne inhabited Edison, the more he wondered how a man cultivates a stubborn streak so pronounced that it transforms a daily barrage of failures into stimulants.
Jim Lynch
...freshly cut Christmas trees smelling of stars and snow and pine resin - inhale deeply and fill your soul with wintry night...
John Geddes
A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.
John Howard Griffin
If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.
George Orwell
The thing I am most afraid of is love. When you say you love someone you are giving them license to hurt you.
Dorothy Koomson
More than once have I thought, Why does crime, even when as powerful as Cæsar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble? I consider that to murder a brother, a mother, a wife, is a thing worthy of some petty Asiatic king, not a Roman Cæsar; but if that position were mine, I should not write justifying letters to the Senate. But Nero writes. Nero is looking for appearances, for Nero is a coward. But Tiberius was not a coward; still he justified every step he took. Why is this? What a marvellous, involuntary homage paid to virtue by evil! And knowest thou what strikes me? This, that it is done because transgression is ugly and virtue is beautiful. Therefore a man of genuine æsthetic feeling is also a virtuous man. Hence I am virtuous.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
A world in which people with learning difficulties have access to the resources they need to live happier, healthier, more secure and more meaningful lives.
Steve Silberman
I wasn't in danger today," I tell him in a choked voice. "I escaped danger today." And I did... I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn't even known I was in. "I escaped," I repeat.
Gayle Forman
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
Gloria Steinem
You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.
Ian Fleming
What I’ve learned from my travels is that people are more alike than they are different. Yes, I may have a different home or lifestyle than a mom living in Shanghai, but deep down we are still mothers who hope for the best in our children. I always find so much in common with those I meet on my travels – and that provides a genuine connection that cultural differences can’t erase.
Janna Graber
I once saw many flowers blooming Upon my way, in indolence I scorned to pick them in my going And passed in proud indifference.Now, when my grave is dug, they taunt me; Now, when I'm sick to death in pain, In mocking torment still they haunt me, Those fragrant blooms of my disdain.
Heinrich Heine
Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
Bill Moyers
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
George Orwell
Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman
Fellowship" is a Christianspeak for "flirt with unsuccessfully".
Kevin Roose
If you could know going in that twenty-five years of love would break you in the end, would you risk it? Because isn’t it inevitable? When you make such a large withdrawal of happiness, somewhere you’ll have to make an equally large deposit. It all goes back to the universal law of equilibrium.
Gayle Forman
All we can do is everything we can do. (David Axelrod)
Dan Harris
Hard tasks need hard ways.
Frank Herbert
Be realistic with your expectations. I'd really like to cuddle a unicorn, but it aint going to happen.
India Knight
Institutions are lengthening shadows of strong individuals.
George F. Will
He [Eugène Rougon] believed exclusively in himself; where another saw reasons, Rougon possessed convictions; he subordinated everything to the incessant aggrandisement of his own ego. Despite being utterly devoid of real self-indulgence, he nevertheless indulged in secret orgies of supreme power.
Émile Zola
It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain
George Orwell
The unified field theory that ties together Jobs personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as when he was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan's music or why whatever product he was unveiling at that moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it could be terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft ripping of Apple.
Walter Isaacson
But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.
Marya Hornbacher
As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.
Jane Jacobs
My fear of abandonment is exceeded only by my terror of intimacy.
Ethlie Ann Vare
In the eleventh century obese English king William the Conqueror took to bed and consumed nothing but alcohol to shed pounds, a practice many of his countrymen seem to continue to this day.
David Sax
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.
H.L. Mencken
London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale.
John Lanchester
Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was where she went during her absences. Returning with her eyes filled with gentleness & ignorance, eyes made whole. An ignorance so vast that inside it all the world's wisdom could be contained & lost.
Clarice Lispector
Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.
Patricia McCormick
Whatever Latin America sells—raw materials or manufactures—its chief export product is really cheap labor.
Eduardo Galeano
In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.
Lionel Shriver
Faith in God will elevate you to next level blessings.
Germany Kent
The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
Michael Finkel
And the Crooked Man heard her dreams, because that was where he wandered. His place was the land of the imagination, the world where stories began. The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours. But with them came the Crooked Man, prowling between his world and ours, looking for stories of his own to create, hunting for children who dreamed bad dreams, who were jealous and angry and proud. And he made kings and queens of them, cursing them with a kind of power, even if the real power lay always in his hands. And in return they betrayed the objects of their jealousy to him, and he took them into his lair deep beneath the castle...
John Connolly
Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.
Dahlia Lithwick
Small wonder how pitiably we love our home, cling in her skirts at night, rejoice in her wide star-seducing smile, when every star strikes us sick with the fright: do we really exist at all?
James Agee
Life, here I come!' he said. And was immediately and fatally run over by a bus.
Jonas Jonasson
Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They toiled hard all the week on the ungrateful soil that yielded them but a bare subsistence in return; they went regularly to mass in the little rock-set chapel on Sundays and saint’s days; believed implicitly all that monsieur le cure said to them, and many things which he did not say; and they took all the unknown, not as magnificent but as diabolical
Eliza Lynn Linton
I know that no matter how liberal or progressive I profess to be, no matter how successfully, how diligently I seek to be enlightened and nuanced in my understanding of the world and those around me, I know that there still is a tiny, virulent nugget, a germ of prejudice that exists deep within me — the product of those stereotypes and awful jokes of childhood and adolescence, and that it must always be powerfully held at bay by reason, understanding and love.
Michael Winship
The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.
Oliver Bullough
That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.
Amanda Craig
Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.
David Brooks
Is this how it is with lies? The first one comes hard, the second one easier, until they slip off your tongue easier than truths - maybe because they are easier than truths.
Gayle Forman
But feelings aren't like thoughts, they can't be changed at will.
Dorothy Koomson
The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk of the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest of the brain.
Kathryn Schulz
In fact, in recent years I have become more and more didactic about pubic hair - to the point where I now believe that there are only four things a grown, modern woman should have: a pair of yellow shoes (they unexpectedly go with everything), a friend who will come and post bail at 4 a.m., a fail-safe pie recipe, and a proper muff. A big, hairy minge. A lovely furry moof that looks - when she sits, naked - as if she has a marmoset sitting in her lap. A tame marmoset, that she can send of to pickpocket things, should she so need it - like that trained monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Caitlin Moran
Actually, the idea of economic man is an efficient way of excluding women. We have historically allocated women certain activities and said that she must do them because she is a woman. Then we create an economic theory that states that these activities have no economic meaning.
Katrine Marçal
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.
Matt Ridley
I recall once seeing a commentary advertised as having been written in prison without recourse to other commentaries and by reliance on the Holy Spirit alone. I doubt whether those last two phrases are complementary. If God has set teachers in the church (1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11) and many have written books, can good come out of ignoring them, let along parading that ignorance as glorifying God? God's work is never a one-man show. The one who represents the visible part of the iceberg must ever ackowledge his or her debt to others. I like to remember that the First Epistle to the Corinthians was from Paul and Sosthenes (1 Cor. 1:1) and that the Epistle to the Colossians was from Paul and Timothy.
Leslie Allen
The author says that one of the difficulties of modern parenting is the uncertainty of what parents are preparing children for. In traditional societies this was clear, as parents prepared children for a society and for roles much like their own. She writes, "There is no folk wisdom.
Jennifer Senior
Pain is hard to bear.... But with patience day by day Even this shall pass away.
Theodore Tilton
When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they're just costumes with zippers.
Steven Kotler