Quotes by Journalists - Page 2

Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

H.L. Mencken

You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.

Naomi Wolf

He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism.

Janet Malcolm

What does it mean to not be hidden from the eyes of God even in the womb? What does it say about God that He "beheld [David’s] unformed substance"? Alone in the field, far removed in both space and time from the overwhelming voices we contend with every day, David came to a remarkable revelation: He was loved simply because he existed.

Jonathan Martin

Forgetting! It is a form of suicide, a renunciation of the only good the we truly and ineluctably possess: the past. For if joys alone were forgotten, perhaps oblivion would be justly desired. But we are proud and jealous of our sorrows, we love them, we want to remember them. It is they that comprise the crown of life.

Iginio Ugo Tarchetti

Know what an optimist is, Major? A pessimist without much experience.

Nicholas Proffitt

Nobody knows what the whales may have to click and clack about, but it could be a form of voting-time to stop here and synchronously dive down in search of deep water squid, now time to resurface, move on, dive again. Clans also seem to caucus on which males they like and will mate with more or less as a group and which ones to collectively spurn. By all appearances, female sperm whales are terrible size queens. Over the generations, they have consistently voted in favor of enhanced male mass. Their dream candidate nowadays is some fellow named Moby, and he's three times their size.

Natalie Angier

All new news is old news happening to new people

Malcolm Muggeridge

We say the rarajipari is the game of life, Angel said. You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can't control it. You can only adjust.

Christopher McDougall

We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

Michael Pollan

We are faithful as long as we love, but youdemand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving ofherself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there--woman or man?

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

D.T. Max

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

Robert Cormier

Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

Gloria Steinem

You can't reach your potential by remaining in a past due season. Your breakthrough is coming. Strongholds are breaking. Get Ready!

Germany Kent

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

H.L. Mencken

Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

Joshua Foer

Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

Marya Hornbacher

Power breeds resentment and withers the slow-growing plant that is trust, and people who use it to capture others not only fail to make friends but often end up captives themselves. And perhaps what is sadder still is that when you control other people you take away all that there might be in a real encounter with them and replace it with your fears. And while you might get gratitude for a while, or guilt and tears, you won't get what they had to offer if you'd let them give you what was really in their hearts.

Merle Shain

Patriotism, currently, is nothing but the deadly evolution of narrow minded politics which has distorted language.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The bubbly play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men when glass in hand they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse.

Jack London

And all our gods are not lies. They existed. All our gods, from the beginning of time, have been men with psychiatric conditions. And their delusions were so deep, they passed them on.

Manu Joseph

Once you witness an injustice, you are no longer an observer but a participant.” ~ June Callwood.

June Callwood

You can be as good as Rembrandt, but if no one discovers you, you will only be a genius in theory.

Eric Weiner

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

Hunter S. Thompson

Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.

George Orwell

Misperceiving that there is one correct choice is a common mistake. Coming to understand that there are usually a few good choices--and then there's the one you pick, commit to, and make great--is the best way to make flexible, optimal, good decisions in life.

Katie Couric

Many educators are loth to admit that the pursuit of pleasure might be a valid reason for drug use, or to recognize young people's curiosity, their need to experiment, to take risks and define their own boundaries.

Tom Feiling

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

Christopher Morley

The surpluses will have to be expended somehow, and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great achievements in science, and especially in art. When the oligarchs have completely mastered the people, they will have time to spare for other things. They will become worshippers of beauty. They will become art-lovers. And under their direction and generously rewarded, will toil the artists. The result will be great art; for no longer, as up to yesterday, will the artists pander to the bourgeois taste of the middle class. It will be great art, I tell you, and wonder cities will arise that will make tawdry and cheap the cities of old time. And in these cities will the oligarchs dwell and worship beauty

Jack London

You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The fear of the drugs running out is managable-the fear of time running down isn't.

Ann Marlowe

Fate is a funny character. She puts obstacles in your path to see what character ye have. Life isn't fair,life is a test.

Melissa Francis

Truth can be told in an instant, forgiveness can be offered spontaneously, but reconciliation is the work of lifetimes and generations.

Krista Tippett

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

Amanda Craig

The media not only fans our fears, it comforts us in our hubris. Nearly every scare story comes with a Message: You can take control. You can do something to keep bad things from happening to your children and to keep life from throwing you curveballs.

Judith Warner

Each cherry took about three seconds to eat. Three seconds to eat, but at least five years in the making. It seemed unfair to the hard-working cherry tree. The least I could do was to devote my attention to the cherry in those three seconds, really appreciate the tartness of the skin and the faint crunching sound when I bite down. I guess it's called mindfulness. Or being in the moment, or making the mundane sacred. Whatever it is, I'm doing it more. Like the ridiculously extended thank-you list for my hummus, the fruit taboo made me more aware of the whole cherry process, the seed, the soil, the five years of watering and waiting. That's the paradox: I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.

A.J. Jacobs

Like daffodils in the early days of spring, my neurons were resprouting receptors as the winter of the illness ebbed.

Susannah Cahalan

My son will wear the title well, the Duke thought, and realized with a sudden chill that this was another death thought.

Frank Herbert

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment.

Dan Harris

...you want the sweetness of our beginning without the bitterness of our struggle - what are you asking - do you want light without shadow? ...

John Geddes

Well, they never know they're ill, do they? You can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. So, I suppose you just feel normal and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.

David Wong

I'm white and I don't dance, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.

Charles Portis

There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.

Tony Horwitz

We also serve who only punctuate.

Brian Moore

The two smallest boys were cut down first, bodies bounding in different directions as they were shot from opposite sides of the field, like pinballs caught in a tight corner.

Cole Alpaugh

The words of the true poems give you more than poems, they give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, & everything else, they balance the ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, they do not seek beauty, they are sought, forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death, yet they are not the finish, but rather the outset, they bring none of his or her terminus or to be content & full, whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of the stars, to learn one of the meanings, to launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings & never be quiet again.

Walt Whitman

People who believe in buried gods,’ said Louis.‘Do you believe in buried gods, Detective Walsh?’‘I’m Episcopalian. I believe in everything.

John Connolly

...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...

John Geddes

When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent directly or indirectly, in the assay.

Samuel G. Blythe

One moment of incompetence can be fatal.

Frank Herbert

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

Dorothy Day

There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.

Adela Rogers St. John

The father of confederation is deadlock.

Goldwin Smith

I know what it feels like to miss everything about him--the way he smells, the way his mouth curls up when he laughs, his voice.

Travis Neighbor Ward

religion is no longer the opium of the people but the vitamin pills of the feeble.

Régis Debray

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

Albert Camus

In the Carolinas they say "hill people" are different from "flatlands people," and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I'm inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I'd been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community ... and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice -- which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels' noisy showboating, but -- compared to their flatlands cousins -- much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse.

Hunter S. Thompson

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