Quotes by Journalists - Page 21

ECONOMICS IS HAUNTED by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine—the special pleading of selfish interests.

Henry Hazlitt

The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable, multidimensional creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety, and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. The psyche becomes impossible to fully describe because there is nothing, including the process of describing it, that is not 'it' in action.

Paul Levy

It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.

Frank Herbert

Bach felt the beauty and sadness of the moment. These men who defied the power of the Russian heavy artillery, these coarse, hardened soldiers who were dispirited by their lack of ammunition and tormented by vermin and hunger had all understood at once that what they needed more than anything in the world was not bread, not bandages, not ammunition, but these tiny branches twined with useless tinsel, these orphanage toys.

Vasily Grossman

I never wanted to run a company.To me a business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done. Mark Zuckerberg in The Facebook Effect written by David Kirkpatrick

David Kirkpatrick

He who gives back at first repulse and without striking the second blow, despairs success, has never been, is not, and never will be, a hero in love, war or business. - Frederick Tudor

Gavin Weightman

In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.

Brenda Ueland

No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself. That's just the way Evil is. All things considered, it's better to be on the side of Good, even if Evil occasionally has nicer uniforms.

John Connolly

To think at all requires a purpose, no matter how vague. The best thinking, however, requires a definite purpose, and the more definite this purpose the more definite will be our thinking. Therefore in taking up any special line of thought, we must first find just what our end or purpose is, and thus get clearly in mind what our problems are.

Henry Hazlitt

I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

Chuck Klosterman

Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing – flying kicks, roaring weapons, crashing cars, flaming explosions. These are the moral equivalents of old-time cinematic sex. The fictional spurting of gun muzzles after flirtation and seduction but stop a titillating instant short of actual copulation. The results of such aggressive vivacity remain a mystery. The corpse itself, riddled and gaping, swelling or dismembered, the action of heat and bacteria, of mummification or decay are the most illicit pornography.

Katherine Dunn

Creativity is always a leap of faith. Writers sit down in front of empty pages. Painters stare before blank easels. Thespians rehearse looking toward empty stages. Creativity is experimental by nature.

Brian D'Ambrosio

In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools.

Helen Brown

A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.

Frank Herbert

Oh, Pet. How you fascinate me.

Samantha A. Cole

My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it.

Tahir Shah

It's a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn't happen "in here" or "out there" but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.

Eric Weiner

Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.

John Connolly

My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible. It is with pain that I bid farewell even to the beauty of a child - I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became a child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth.

Clarice Lispector

Capitalists' wet dreams is to be involved in charity.

Stieg Larsson

...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.

Cameron Conaway

Prototypes of inventions that use novel combinations of resonance, magnetism, states of matter, certain geometries or inward swirling motion to unlock the secrets of universal energy have already been built. They provide proof of new or rediscovered principles. In many variations of these inventions, a small input triggers a disproportionately large output of useable power.""These energy converters don't violate any laws of physics if they simply tap into a previously unrecognized source of power - background space. A flow of energy from that source can continue day and night, whether or not the sun shines or the wind blows.

Jeane Manning

Reporters go through four stages in a war zone. In the first stage, you’re Superman, invincible. In the second, you’re aware that things are dangerous and you need to be careful. In the third, you conclude that math and probability are working against you. In the fourth, you know you’re going to die because you’ve played the game too long. I was drifting into stage three.

Richard Engel

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.

Joan Didion

morality is moral only when it is voluntary

Lincoln Steffens

At dawn, they call in a napalm airplane, but it drop the shit damn near right on top of us. Our own fellers be all signed and burnt up - come running out into the open, eyes big as biscuits, everybody cussing and sweating and scared, woods set on fire, damn near put the rain out!

Winston Groom

Fred said, “Man, I think he’s gonna make a fuckin’ suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.”“Holy crap,” said John. “He’ll be gorgeous.

David Wong

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

This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.

David Brooks

Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

Gabriel García Márquez

Everyone I've ever met who was worth knowing was a bit different at school. You just need to find your people''Find my people?''Your tribe

Jojo Moyes

The cheese stands aloneThe cheese stands aloneHeigh-ho the merry-oThe cheese stands alone

Robert Cormier

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

Brenda Ueland

He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.“‘How about my present?’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.“Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer. Ah!“No. No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try. No, no use. Not this evening, I’m afraid.“All right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t paying by results.“He made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the dressing-table.’“Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail.

George Orwell

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Maybe life is like a walking safari. If you venture out expecting lions and leopards all the time you’ll almost always never find them. Maybe the best things are the ones you never knew you wanted to see. The ones that, scary as they may seem, were just the things you needed to unleash reality. I’d selfishly written my story before even reaching Africa. I’d romanticized scenarios, fabricated settings, invented fantastical dialogue, and almost overlooked the lesson I’d been sent to learn – to live life on foot and not in my head, with fearlessness, presence, without expectation, and above all, with gratitude.

Jill Paris

Faith was the most powerful force in the universe.

Robert Ferrigno

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

Djuna Barnes

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

Edward R. Murrow

Only someone you loved could make you wear that kind of expression. Someone who had once loved you knew how to get to the part of you where the pain lived.

Dorothy Koomsoon

We can’t go from zero to sixty in a day or even a week when it comes to shifting our food-habit gears. We have to take baby steps, starting with an increasing awareness of our habits and a willingness to chip away at the ones that aren’t doing us any good. Slowly, with time and commitment, we move away from the rat-race, multitasking mentality to a place where we want to give our meals and ourselves the time and attention we deserve.

Mary DeTurris Poust

Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.

Nancy Gibbs & Michael Duffy

Have you heard," he said "that many of our people believe if you know five colloquial expressions in their tribal language, they must always provide you with nourishment and shelter? But-" He paused as though to make sure she was paying attention. "But if you know fewer than five, they owe you not even a sip of water."She nodded, understanding his point, but he pressed it."Learn those five phrases, Miss Sweeney," he said.

Masha Hamilton

No time is more precious and well rewarded than those few moments you spend reading a story to a child

Robert D. Harris

The library was the best place in the world.

Anita Anand

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

Russell Baker

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

Ernest Hemingway

Writers see the world differently. Every voice we hear, every face we see, every hand we touch could become story fabric.

Buffy Andrews

Ours was not going to be a clone of the usual expeditions, oozing with sleekness. It was clear from the start that oddity was our advantage.

Tahir Shah

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

George Orwell

It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!

Émile Zola

If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.

Christopher Morley

One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the back-breaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.

Michael Pollan

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Christopher Hitchens

When you see the Statue of Liberty, you will be in America.

Antonio Russo

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men".

Sebastian Junger

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.

Octave Mirbeau

She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.

Omar El Akkad

The eighties happened. The nineties happened. Death and sickness and getting fat and going bald happened. I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.

Mitch Albom

One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.

Keith Gessen

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