Quotes by Journalists - Page 73

Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it really cost. If that was the reality, then every meal would have the potential to be a perfect meal. We would not need to go hunting for our connection to our food and the web of life that produces it. We would no longer need any reminding that we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and that what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world. I don’t want to have to forage every meal. Most people don’t want to learn to garden or hunt. But we can change the way we make and get our food so that it becomes food again—something that feeds our bodies and our souls. Imagine it: Every meal would connect us to the joy of living and the wonder of nature. Every meal would be like saying grace.
Michael Pollan
It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
Italo Calvino
There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden farewell to a soul beginning the long journey towards eternity. There was almost no chance that anyone present would ever see the departed again
Cole Moreton
Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind.
Hunter S. Thompson
Our task over the next few generations is to transform the world of independent states in which we live into some sort of genuine international community. If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it probably will be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.
Gwynne Dyer
Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport
Matt Haig
Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.
Malcolm Gladwell
It's a strange feeling, owning a secret. It's like a stone in my stomach, crushing my insides and making me feel sick every time I think of it.
Fiona Barton
When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.
Adelle Waldman
The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.
Christopher Hitchens
You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.
John Lanchester
Comments are free but facts are sacred.
C. P. Scott
Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
Christopher Hitchens
Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians -- we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted -- to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn't care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can't bear an opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Big Horn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.
Michael Pollan
How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.
Matt Ridley
...the priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of interference.
Upton Sinclair
If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with some much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you're even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones we'd most like other people to think we read over and over again.
Laura Miller
joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life’s terms
Mark Matousek
You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules" p.79
Gloria Steinem
It is easier to start a war than to end it.
Gabriel García Márquez
If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.
Edward R. Murrow
How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.
Joseph O'Connor
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.
José Saramago
As additional precautions, Kranz requested that a two-hundred-foot radio antenna (called a deep-space dish) in Australia be added to the global network tracking and communicating with the spacecraft, and that additional computers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland be what he called "cranked up" -- made ready for use. He also telephoned the Real Time Computer Complex on the ground floor of the Operations Wing to ask that an additional I.B.M. computer be brought onto the line.
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr.
A man don't always have to eat what he's standing life. If he wants, a man can fix a meal of his own choosing.
Nathan McCall
I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.
Philip Hoare
Soon he essentially stopped talking. "I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode," he mentioned. Eventually, he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised," he wrote, "by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable." Later he added, "I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.
Michael Finkel
The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love.
Gabriel García Márquez
I am a lawyer, and for me it is very sad to say that there is now law here. There are weapons rather than law. What did Mao say? Power comes out of the barrel of a gun. It's very true. The situation is decadent. A lot of Serbs think this is leading us nowhere but they feel powerless. How many disagree? I don't know. Perhaps thirty percent disagree, but most of them are frightened and quiet. Perhaps sixty percent agree or are confused enough to go along. They are led by the ten percent who have the guns and who have control of the television towers. That's all they need.'p. 107
Peter Maass
Being a writer is 1% inspiration, 50% perspiration and 49% explaining you're not a millionaire like J.K.Rowling.
Gabrielle Tozer
Fear is the thief of dreams.
Brian Krans
Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I'm beginning to guess that everybody's like that.
Christopher Morley
Most women are one man away from welfare.
Gloria Steinem
Procrastination is the lazy cousin of fear.When we feel anxiety around an activity, we postpone it.
Noelle Hancock
...you were there when they trampled me - you picked me up, healed me and gave me back my feelings - is it any wonder I love you?...
John Geddes
I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.
Christopher Hitchens
Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.
Richard Rhodes
Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if tenderized by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flash of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.
Dezső Kosztolányi
I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.
Nancy Mitford
Who needs sports stardom when you can shoot fireballs from your fingertips?
Ethan Gilsdorf
He finished his drink. 'I don’t like mornings either,' he said. “That’s why I’m a writer.
Dorothy B. Hughes
And on this night, the last of its kind before we get married to each other at the stroke of 8 tomorrow in the evening, as I walk towards my bed to call the day off, the last puff of wind brought from a fairy-tale land urges me to write this letter as your girlfriend, for one last time.
Debalina Haldar
...I'm not afraid of the opinions of others - but of being needed and coming up short ...
John Geddes
For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.
Albert Camus
If we try to run the economy for the benefit of a single group or class, we shall injure or destroy all groups, including the members of the very class for whose benefit we have been trying to run it. We must run the economy for everybody
Henry Hazlitt
Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everything else we love-everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires'-it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run.
Christopher McDougall
There might be false starts and do-overs. You are entitled to experiment before you find your calling.
Jane Pauley
Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'.
Andrew Wilson
Only worry about what you absolutely know about,' Mr. Worthington said to me, putting my mind back where it belonged. 'That's the key. Worrying about anything else is just a waste of time and emotion. I know that seems obvious but honestly, the more information you have, the less your imagination can run away with you so the secret is to find out as much as you can about what your particular problem is....and you'll be amazed at how this simplifies things. You no longer have to worry about the what ifs.
Sarah-Kate Lynch
I wonder what Thoreau would have done...[H}is greatest story, I thought, was his life. He knew that anything is possible when you wield the pen and claim your life as your own. But the truth is so few have the privilege to write their own stories. People are born into poverty without a hope of redemption. Children are abused and damaged. Disease and war and famine and a million other things prevent them from wielding the pen. But for those of us who can, should it not be our great privilege to live the lives we've imagined? To be who we want to be? To go on our own great journeys and share our experiences with others?
Ken Ilgunas
Poverty is spiritual halitosis.
George Orwell
And shall I still be allowed to wear ribbons in my mane?" asked Mollie."Comrade," said Snowball, "those ribbons that you are so devoted to are the badge of slavery. Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than ribbons?"Mollie agreed, but she did not sound very convinced.
George Orwell
Tech-savvy types had figured out how to get around the system. With radios it was easy—open up the set, cut the conveyor belt attached to the dial, and replace it with a rubber band that could turn the dial wherever you liked. Television required a little more expertise.
Barbara Demick
He went to make coffee. Because when you have just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person.
Charlie Jane Anders
If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously--acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives--requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious he learned the habit from Nature.
Christopher Morley
Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.
Mark Helprin
He lowered his eyes to his dad's face. There was fear there. Fear. When your dad was frightened, there was something to be frightened about.
Robert Liparulo
There was no single gay point of view. Like skin color or gender or any of those arbitrary, sometimes artificial, difference sexual orientation didn't make us all the same. But it did affect us. It had to.
Kelly J. Cogswell
It's okay to get emotional. It's okay to cry--and this is key--as long as you can play hurt.
Megyn Kelly