Quotes by Journalists - Page 96

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.
Meghna Pant
Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. Youth is the time for exploration, maturation, socialization.
Jeff Jarvis
The reality is that changes are coming. ... They must come. You must share in bringing them.
John Hersey
If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories—which is to say, other people—cease to matter to us.
Kathryn Schulz
As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Water was how the desert would bring everyone together. The antelope's daily prayer, weighing the mortal need of water with the mortal danger of obtaining it.
Mike Bond
That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
Joan Didion
Both Obama and Romney ended up in the wrong place: the former thought American exceptionalism was no longer true and should be given up while the latter thought it was still true. Neither was willing to tell Americans that they were no longer exceptional but should try to be again.
George Packer
My life of conversation leads me to reimagine the very meaning of hope. I define hope as distinct from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholeheartedly with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory.
Krista Tippett
There are three ingredients in the good life learning earning and yearning.
Christopher Morley
I'm beginning to think that to hope isn't the same as to expect something. To hope is to believe that life is an acceptable chaos.
Goenawan Mohamad
We have, as a nation, made choices that by all reasonable expectations should have put us in harm's way. There is little doubt that we continue to make choices that are likely to make the danger even greater. And yet, by dint of an accident of geography and economics, we have so far been spared the worst consequences of our actions. And even as those consequences begin to take hold in other places, here, in the parts of America where most of us live, at least for the moment, we can hear the winds roaring over our heads like that coal train, but somehow the worst of the danger still seems removed. What is our responsibility? (164)
Seamus McGraw
Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.
Laura Lippman
The road itself tells us far more than signs do.
Tom Vanderbilt
Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.
Jack London
We watch our bodies and our brains slow down as younger bodies and brains zip past us, and we just accept it, not realizing there is a whole world offering to sharpen and improve us. We simply need to look for it.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty
To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.
Thomas Frank
Men and women alike have convinced themselves of a dragging belief: that somehow women are incomplete without having children.
Caitlin Moran
Record sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.
Chuck Klosterman
It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality.
Nigel Slater
Don't throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery.
Philander Johnson
Elizabeth was counting on Marco to keep cousin Mary occupied until after the board meeting was over. A piece of cheese might catch a mouse, but an afternoon alone with a muscular masseur would ensnare her cousin far more effectively. And afterwards, while Mary lay sated and sleeping upon a massage table, wiser heads could determine the company's future. There were times, Elizabeth thought, when success in business demanded utter ruthlessness.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Christian pop culture can be worthwhile if done well, but bad Christian pop culture isn't redeemed merely by the fact that it's Christian.
Kevin Roose
Prohibition is to abstain from intoxicating liquor, as it makes us morbid and sometimes drunk. But we get drunk every day, nevertheless, not so much by the strength of what we sip from the cup, but that which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we inhale, which at fermentation conspire at eventide to make us so drunk and tired that we lose control of ourselves and fall asleep. Everybody is a drunkard, and if we were to enforce real prohibition we should all be dead.
Marcus Garvey
[T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis.
Gary Taubes
Philanthropist: a rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.
Ambrose Bierce
Firefly, it is an act of bravery to feel your feelings. Oh, Meg would've loved that. It's an act of bravery to feel your feelings, even if your feelings are telling you to die.
Gayle Forman
He was always mindful of keeping his spirits in check lest they soar unreasonably high.
Kevin Purdy
Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.
Nicholas D. Kristof
My point is that this Potter business has legs. It will run and run, and we must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention. I appeal to the children of this country and to their Potter-fiend parents to write to Warner Bros and Universal, and perhaps, even, to the great J K herself. Bring Harry home to Britain—and if you want a site with less rainfall than Rome, with excellent public transport, and strong connections to Harry Potter, I have just the place.
Boris Johnson
But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect's wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words.
Clarice Lispector
It has been very truly said that the mob has many heads but no brains.
Antoine de Rivarol
He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.
Jon Meacham
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
Gabriel García Márquez
But unlike Jack, Bobby had not been groomed to be a candidate, and he was constitutionally incapable of the flattery and false praise with which politicians like Johnson got others to do their daily bidding.
Jonathan Darman
...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.
Tom Hodgkinson
All you can try to do is be better than you were yesterday, everyday.
Marcus Harrison Green
You're not supposed to laugh at your own father. Ever.
Jeannette Walls
More question. You know that curiosity killed the cat?
Gemma Malley
We're like little kids. We are little kids, but don't tell us that—we're having a fantastic time. We have our little house, and live our little life. We are the perfect young husband and wife. We have nonstop dinner parties—the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine. I sometimes feel as if I've raced off a cliff and am spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I'm fine. It's fine. It's all going to be fine. Crazy people don't have dinner parties, do they? No.
Marya Hornbacher
...you can't rationalize suffering - it's indeterminate - the real unknowable variable God substitutes in...
John Geddes
The selling of food matters as much as the food itself… if not more.
Michael Moss
The essence of man is imperfection.
Norman Cousins
Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.
Amanda Craig
You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.
David Hewson
My general feeling is that date make-up should be an honest advertisement for a potential relationship. Frankly, it’s easier for you that way. There’s no point labouring over lots of perfectly applied make-up if you are, in reality, a low-maintenance kind of girl who can’t possibly keep it up beyond the honeymoon period. Equally, it seems unwise to imply you’re someone who rolls out of bed and out to a Sunday farmer’s market all natural skin, flushed cheeks and a smidge of lip balm when your real life is spent in full coverage foundation and smoky eyes. Like any part of dating, it is always safer to be yourself because who can maintain a lie for long?
Sali Hughes
According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame it's counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.
Barry Estabrook
Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.
Frank Herbert
I [Music] was born in the open air, in the breaks of waves and the whistling of sandstorms, the hoots of owls and the cackles of tui birds. I travel in echoes. I ride the breeze. I was forged in nature, rugged and raw. Only man shapes my edges to make me beautiful. [Chapter 2]
Mitch Albom
At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
Gabriel García Márquez
If it’s reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.
Peter Stamm
I know we can do this. I know it’s nothow you would have chosen it, but I know I can make you happy. And all I can say is that you make me … you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy,even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.
Jojo Moyes
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.
George Orwell
Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness compassion intelligence everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible the absolute the sky on fire inexhaustible springtime life after death and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
Albert Camus
Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.
José Saramago
It is a common condition of being poor... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.
Rick Bragg
Do other dads not end their phone calls with existential despair? Because that's what my dad does. Papa ends most of his calls with me the way you might close a conversation with someone you want to menace. "Anyway," he'll say, "I'll be here. Staring into the abyss." Or, when I have given him good news, "The talented will rule and the rest will perish in the sea of mediocrity." Or, when I have given him bad news, "I am for for everything that happens to you, as everything is my fault." He never ends with anything that couldn't one day be construed as a tragic yet comic last word.
Scaachi Koul
So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.
Cameron Conaway
They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.
Ambrose Bierce
It is in games that many men discover their paradise.
Robert Lynd