Quotes by Journalists - Page 88

In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.
Tim Butcher
To assure him, Peter Lim decided that the newsroom adopt this approach: it was better to produce the best story than the first story. He had good reason. Finding scoops in a Singapore with many OB markers carried a real risk: the story was sometimes incomplete or, as in the case of the bus fare increase, premature. For completeness, you sometimes incomplete or, as in the case of the bus fare increase, premature. For completeness, you sometimes had to rely on official spokesmen. But once they knew you were on the story, they either prevailed on the editors to hold it until the time was right to release it, or gave it to every newspaper. The edict went against the grain. No journalist could resist the temptation to be first with the news.
Cheong Yip Seng
I chiefly concern myself with those who seldom get a hearing, & I don't feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful. The powerful are generally excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs. The powerful should be quoted, yes, but to measure their pronouncements against the truth, not to obscure it.
Joe Sacco
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
Walt Whitman
Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.
Geraldine Brooks
Most people couple within their own height range- short couples are 8 percent apart, midsize couples are 8 percent apart. The exception is talls. Tall women, meanwhile, date men who are approximately the same size, 0 to 5 percent taller; extremely tall women go for men 0 to 2 percent taller. Tall men are kids in a candy store, dating whomever they want.
Arianne Cohen
And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.
Eduardo Galeano
With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mustered up enough courage to speak."What will you do if I surrender?" he asked."Why, I'll eat you," said the dragon."And if I don't surrender?""I'll eat you just the same.
Heywood Broun
History is not always pessimistic for if World War II Europe has taught us anything it is that the rebuilding of cities is possible and the mending of a nation’s spirit can be achieved.
Aysha Taryam
There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
Anna Quindlen
Dying is easy. Living is hard
Gayle Forman
Trying to corral the suburban stampede with a bunch of school buses was like herding cats. Actually, it was worse than herding cats. It was herding white people, earth's only species with a greater sense of entitlement than a cat.
Tanner Colby
The parable about the Good Samaritan tells how a Samaritan rescues a man who is mugged and beaten by robbers on the Jericho—Jerusalem road, a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway. To understand how this story must have shocked the Jews, imagine someone telling a story about “The Good Nazi.” The Jews and Samaritans hated one another.
Paul Miller
Just because something was legal didn't automatically make it right.
Carl Hiaasen
In angry protest the red telephone splintered the silence.
Ian Fleming
These steel monstrosities screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes.
Mike Bond
She really liked you, Noah,''Yeah, well, maybe I'm just an asshole.'I realize my hand is still in his hair and I retract it quickly. He grabs it, holds it against him. You're not an asshole I'm thinking, but for some reason I can't say it. It would be like admitting something else; like the fact that he's an asshole to every girl who likes him, but never to me. And then I'd have to really think about why that is and that's not something I'll ever be comfortable with at all, even though his eyes are like maps and his words are like anchors and his songs are like personal messages and I love all that.- Chloe
Becky Wicks
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.
Jojo Moyes
It was not desirable for the paroles to have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
George Orwell
It’s not just about recognizing how ‘precious’ every moment is, or about ‘living for today.’ It’s about finding the sacred center of now, and living there, moment to moment, always.
Kathryn E. Livingston
London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.
Nick Cohen
The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.
Clarice Lispector
Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.
David Halberstam
Your next action could change the world, so make it a good one.
A.J. Jacobs
I will be­lieve that the bat­tle of fem­i­nism is over, and that the fe­male has reached a po­si­tion of equal­ity with the male, when I hear that a coun­try has al­lowed it­self to be turned up­side-down and led to the brink of war by its pas­sion for a to­tally bald woman writer.
Rebecca West
You can be rich or deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it
George Orwell
I shouldn't wonder if you didn't wonder much too much!
P.L. Travers
Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is the ultimate question of moral entitlement, and relevant only if right is relevant in this context, and it is not. A suicidal man cannot be concerned - and nor should he be - with questions of moral entitlement. (And how absurd.) His one concern should be whether self-execution will most expediently relieve his suffering.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.
Phillip Adams
A decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.
Timothy Egan
Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.
Walt Whitman
Because if you don't know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks... But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.
Dorothy West
Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.
Christopher McDougall
Everything I had to give went to my children, and though I loved them and my husband utterly, the drudgery of the day-to-day made it seem as if not love but coffee, my Toyota and sheer logistics were what propelled me through life.
Marcia DeSanctis
I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 
Ernest Hemingway
It's not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch. " He finally whispered, "We also need to forgive ourselves.
Mitch Albom
How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?
Sebastian Junger
I think that sitting there talking to Dan was a thing that had a great impression on my life. I know that being an idiot and all, I ain't supposed to have no philosophy of my own, but maybe it's just because nobody never too the time to talk to me about it. It was Dan's philosophy that everything that happen to us, or for that matter, to anything everywhere, is controlled by natural laws that govern the universe. His views were extremely complicated, but the gist of what he said begun to change my whole outlook on things.
Winston Groom
Ours is a sovereign nation Bows to no foreign will But whenever they cough in Washington They spit on Parliament Hill.
Joe Wallace
...authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...
John Geddes
hearing women singing about themselves - rather than men singing about women - makes everything seem wonderfully clear, and possible
Caitlin Moran
Justice is the virtue we 'd rather have done unto others than practiced on ourselves.
Jonathan V Last
Our brains are embodied—much of the problem with the debate over addiction and psychiatry more generally is a refusal to accept this and our ongoing need to see “physical,” “neurological,” and “psychological” as completely distinct.
Maia Szalavitz
And yet, despite the multiplicity of times we've done it, it is still a funny, exultant, true thing - where for a short time you turn into something else and fly; where you stop fretting and wanting, and are simply alight with joy - and all while never venturing beyond the walls of your room. And I would put our continued success down to one simple thing. At the end of every tumbling session, one of us will turn to the other and say, "Thank you very much. That was very pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. My dear, I am much obliged to you."Because at the end of the day, that is the hottest sex tip of all: gratitude. That you've found someone who wants to do that thing, with you, and no government has yet found a way to charge you VAT on it. You can set fire to the sky, and not be charged a penny.Sometimes, it's great being a human.
Caitlin Moran
[Looking like a straight girl] means wearing clothes that seek and destroy comfort. These are garments designed by gay men to attract heterosexual men. The straight girl is simply the hanger for an inside joke.
Mary Dugger
In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.
Vasily Grossman
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
George Orwell
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the
Will Self
No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one.
George Seldes
But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.
Frank Herbert
We began our hospital visits: one day Susan, one day me, everyday The Big Hoom. On one of these visits, she told me about the tap that opened at my birth and the lack drip filling her up, and it tore a hole in my heart. If this was what she could manage with a single sentence, what did thirsty years of marriage do to The Big Hoom?
Jerry Pinto
A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.
George Orwell
But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.
Jack London
Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking ofher for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out ofhand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months,and four days ago.
Gabriel García Márquez
Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.Ho ho ho. Let's not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday in this country. Its value has been discounted. The only freedom we truly crave today is freedom from Dumbness. Nothing else matters.
Hunter S. Thompson
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
A.J. Liebling
We also serve who only punctuate.
Brian Moore
Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.
François Mauriac
If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?
David Wong
Le Marais?’‘It’s a little district in the centre of Paris. It is full of cobbled streets and teetering apartment blocks and gay men and orthodox Jews and women of a certain age who once looked like Brigitte Bardot. It’s the only place to stay.
Jojo Moyes