Quotes by Journalists - Page 85

Military men say that troops can stand twenty percent losses; more than that, they go to pieces. But we had many an outfit with only twenty percent survivors and they went on fighting.
Upton Sinclair
(I'm not online.) I don’t have a fax. I don’t go in for any of that stuff. The typewriter is as far as I went.
Walter Kaylin
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus
No matter where you live, you have the memory of something you used to eat that is no longer a part of your diet - something your grandmother used to make, something a small shop used to carry. Something we have lost. This extinction is a process; it happens one meal at a time.
Preeti Simran Sethi
It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.
Robert Fisk
We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Economics.
P.J. O'Rourke
...[A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid.
John Howard Griffin
You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.
David Halberstam
America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
Walter Cronkite
And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.
Matt Haig
All beauty has a dark side. Heaven can't exist without hell.
Gemma Malley
Think of it." Now he is speaking to you, no one but you. "It may not matter what we want for science, or what we think is ethical. All we must do is provide the right environment, and let the heart do what it desires. The heart wants to beat.
Stephen Kiernan
Hate born from too many tears and too little Love
Fred Rosen
See what's inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what's inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It's all there. Hate as well. We approach the mystery of life, but it's impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry.
Manuel Rivas
Some theologians argue that one kind of grace is better than another, and that some people think they're experiencing “divine” grace when it's actually just “common.”To me, that's like bickering about what color God's eyes are. (They're hazel, in case you were wondering.)
Cathleen Falsani
Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.
Chuck Klosterman
I used to think the most important thing for a reporter was to be where the news is and be the first to know. Now I feel a reporter should be able to effect change. Your reporting should move people and motivate people to change the world. Maybe this is too idealistic. Young people who want to be journalists must, first, study and, second, recognize that they should never be the heroes of the story. ..A journalist must be curious, and must be humble. --Zhou Yijun
Judy Polumbaum
My words itch at your ears till you understand them
Walt Whitman
Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?
David Hewson
A novelist's job is almost to be a stupid as possible, except in the cunning moment when you need to structure something, when you need to be very intelligent indeed. The rest of the time, you need almost an empty mind, where you can let any image in, follow it along, and allow an emotional charge, almost the way actors and singers can work. The more instinct you have as a novelist, and the less intelligence, the better.
Colm Tóibín
We are like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy.
Mark Helprin
And here she was, an old woman now, living and hoping, keeping faith, afraid of evil, full of anxiety for the living and an equal concern for the dead; here she was, looking at the ruins of her home, admiring the spring sky without knowing that she was admiring it, wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour- camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be.
Vasily Grossman
For my mother’s entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.
Meghan Daum
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
Albert Camus
He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face toward the flames.
George Orwell
His youth was a wingless Dodo.
Lawrence Osborne
Begin somewhere you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.
Liz Smith
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H.L. Mencken
It's possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.
Michael Finkel
So why do we call her crazy for piling her trailer full of more cats than she could take care of but applaud when somebody accumulates more money than they can spend? They're both hoarders.
David Wong
There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.
Zoë Heller
People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart -- but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way of real thought.
Adelle Waldman
Men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable.
Jacques Yonnet
Simplicity carried to an extreme becomes elegance.
Jon Franklin
Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.
Christopher Hitchens
All that tread,The globe are but a handful to the tribes,That slumber in its bosom.
William Cullen Bryant
...we live in the same city but don't see the same things - you see buildings and I see memories...
John Geddes
My father is the most genial Midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner—financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy—so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his daughters into being more prepared.When he retired, he reached new levels of preparedness, so his car contained bottled water, hand wipes, a roadside emergency kit with flares, books on tape, a coin dispenser, and two hand towels to use as makeshift bibs so he and my mother could drive and eat without making a mess.
Jancee Dunn
If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. (Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.)
Christopher Hitchens
For a few moments, raising his arms desperately, the Reverend Mouret implored Heaven. His shoulder-blades cracked, with such fantastic force did he pray. But soon enough his arms fell to his sides, his hopes abashed. From heaven came one of those silences utterly void of hope known to the devout.
Émile Zola
When you're the only pea in the pod your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.
Russell Baker
Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget.
Gabriel García Márquez
An educated mind is nothing but the God-given mind of a child after his parents’ and his grandparents’ generation have got through molding it. We can’t help teaching you; you will ask that of us; but we are prone to teach you what we know, and I am going, now and again, to warn you:Remember we really don’t know anything. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don’t know. That is your playground, bare and graveled, safe and unbreakable.
Lincoln Steffens
Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.
Israel Shenker
The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.
Robert Lynd
The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.
José Saramago
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night in a second-class hotel.
Malcolm Muggeridge
But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.
Christine Kenneally
You don’t want atheism shoved down your throat? OK. We will stock knocking on doors spreading our ‘Truth,’ and having tax-exempt organizations dedicated to atheism that have influential political action committees. We will also stop printing ‘In atheism we trust’ on all US currency and saying, ‘One nation, under atheism” in the pledge of allegiance. We will also stop insisting that everyone who disagrees with us will be sentence to eternal damnation… Wait…
David G. McAfee
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
If virtue does not equal powers, powers will be misused.
John Howard Griffin
Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life.
Gregory McDonald
Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.
John O'Hara
Can you please tell me who you people are?""Criminals. Offenders. Monsters. We've all been imprisoned in Tartarus for discretions committed against the gods of Olympus."~ Hope/Daedalus, The River Styx
David Revilla
Oliver Cromwell banned kissing on Sundays---even for married couples---on pain of a prison sentence.
Mitchell Symons
Historically, psychologists have looked at introversion as the absence of extroversion. They measure extroversion, and if you are low in it, then you are considered an introvert. This perpetuates the perception of introversion as negative space, and introverted activities as not really doing anything. We need to train ourselves, and others, out of this idea. We need to start seeing doing nothing (or reading, or working alone on projects, or whatever it is we do to recharge) as activities that are as valid as any social event.
Sophia Dembling
Does this story have a happy ending?" Bobby asked."There is no such thing as an ending," she said. "Good things come out of bad things and bad things come out of good things, but it always continues. It's as in life. Books are life. There is just the part you read. They start before that. They finish after it. Everything carries on forever. You are only in it for those pages, for a tiny window of time.
David Whitehouse
Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly.
Émile Zola
Duty comes in many forms; at times duty to country may conflict with duty to family. Yet, with a lucid mind the guises can be torn away and in the end, duty becomes but one, and that duty is to value justice above everything--to do what is right not because someone ordains it, but because the heart which is the seat of truth decrees it so.
F. Sionil Jose'
Iturbide exclaimed: "Don't frighten me, General!""Don't be frightened," said the General in a calm voice. "Go to Mexico, even if they kill you or even if you die. And go now while you're still young, because one day it will be too late, and then you won't feel at home here or there. You'll feel like a stranger everywhere, and that's worse than being dead." He looked him straight in the eye, placed his open hand on his own chest, and concluded:"Just look at me.
Gabriel García Márquez