Quotes by Journalists - Page 38

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

George Orwell

(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.

David Brooks

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

Clarice Lispector

My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men--some more fluently than others.

John Vaillant

We have passed some of the dirtiest chapters of mankind. Perhaps we are heading towards further inhuman treatments in many places such as Syria and Palestine.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

We could, however, demand much more from the social media sites that are so eager to sign up our kids and encourage them to share, share, share. These companies are selling our kids’ “likes” and habits to advertisers, and enticing all of us to give up more and more of our privacy.

Emily Bazelon

About the only person we ever heard of that wasn't spoiled by being lionized was a Jew named Daniel.

G. D. Prentice

The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.

Aleksandar Hemon

Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.

Joyce Maynard

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

Albert Camus

I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.

Christopher Hitchens

Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.

Ron Suskind

You're never ready for what you have to do. You just do it. That makes you ready.

Flora Rheta Schreiber

Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Gabriel García Márquez

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

There is nothing in man or nature that does not ask questions.

Curtis Bill Pepper

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.

Christopher Hitchens

I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil's opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn't worry about your paintings anymore. I'm not going to steal them. I don't like them.Sincerely yours, P. Soames

Mark Helprin

No, war is never about killing the enemy. War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.

David Wong

Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to "impute" - to understand that people do judge a book by its cover - and therefore to make sure all the trappings and packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether it's an iPod Mini, or a MacBook Pro, Apple customers know the feeling of opening up the well-crafted box and finding the product nestled in an inviting fashion. "Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging," said Ive. "I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.

Walter Isaacson

Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.

Miguel Syjuco

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

There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can’t explain without handing over a full map of one’s life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for long days and nights when things were bad or good, or when things were too small to be described at all: when things just were. This is a life.

Colm Tóibín

Josie, like Gretchen, isn't afraid of blood. What woman would be?

Chelsea Cain

In a spornographic age it’s no longer enough for the male body to be presented to us by consumerism as merely attractive, or desiring to be desired, as it was in the early days of nakedly narcissistic male metrosexuality. This masculine coquettish-ness, pleasing as it is, no longer offers an intense enough image. Or provokes enough lust. It’s just not very shocking or arousing any more. In fact, it’s just too… normal. To get our attention these days the sporting male body has to promise us nothing less than an immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped gang-bang in the showers.

Mark Simpson

The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness.

Ariel Gore

God I have been - God I am. But quite frankly, sometimes it is all just a little too much for one small cat.

Paul Gallico

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

Walt Whitman

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most.

Michael Pollan

When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They’re gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things.

Miguel Syjuco

Angling is an innocent cruelty.

George Parker

need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.

Henry Hazlitt

To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior.

Carol Lee

We are all somewhere else, during.

Katie Crouch

There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there's a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler's head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.

Chris L. Hayes

I'm more depressed about the realities of the mature bureaucracy and more excited about the ideal that we're fighting for. And the juxtaposition has obvious consequences. Rolf Mowatt-Larrsen

Ron Suskind

Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.

Malcolm Gladwell

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.

Jane Jacobs

It is far better to win a battle through skilled leadership and wise decisions than violence and bloodshed. It may not seem as glorious to the uninitiated, but in the end it results in fewer wounds--of any kind.

Frank Herbert

Stories are a communal currency of humanity.

Tahir Shah

We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”And facing death changes that?"Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials.

Mitch Albom

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.

Caitlin Moran

Think of a typical full-time worker, who's in the office from nine to five daily, but takes thirty minutes for lunch, leaves an hour early on Friday, and comes in an hour late on Tuesday due to a dental appointment. That puts her at 35.5 hours for the week. One errand tacked on to the end of lunch one day or a longish midmorning break will pull her under that thirty-five-hour threshold that defines "full time.

Laura Vanderkam

The more you read, the more you want to know, and so the more questions you have.

Xinran

Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions. Confidence is the public face of competence.

Ron Suskind

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

Rebecca West

...futility is being sorry while doing nothing to remove the cause ...

John Geddes

Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.

Naomi Wolf

If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

George Orwell

No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.

James Surowiecki

Living is like driving," my grandmother used to say. "You have to pick a lane." Have I chosen the right lane? It feels like this place, this moment in time, lies exactly halfway between my past and my future.

Kathleen Flinn

You know how sometimes when you're drifting off to sleep you feel that jolt, like you were falling and caught yourself at the last second? It's nothing to be concerned about, it's usually just the parasite adjusting its grip.

David Wong

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

Naomi Wolf

[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.

Christopher Hitchens

Faith in God will elevate you to next level blessings.

Germany Kent

Because you actually might not know what activities truly engage your attention and satisfy you, he says, it can be helpful to keep a diary of what you do all day and how you feel while doing it. Then, try to do more of what's rewarding, even if it takes an effort, and less of what isn't. Where optimal experience is concerned, he says, "'I just don't have the time' often means 'I just don't have the self-discipline.

Winifred Gallagher

I've taped a list to my bathroom mirror. It's my Most Violated List. . . Anger. I gave the finger to an ATM. You see, the ATM charged me a $1.75 fee for withdrawl. A dollar seventy-five? That's bananas. So I flipped off the screen. As Julie tells me, when you start making rude gestures to inanimate objects, it's time to work on your anger issues. Mine is not the shouting, pulsing-vein-in-the forehead rage. Like my dad, I rarely raise my voice. My anger problem is more one of long-lasting resentment. It's a heap of real or perceived slights that eventually build up into a mountain of bitterness. . . get some perspective. . . I ask myself the question God asked Jonah. 'Do you do well to be angry?'. . .The world will not end. . . Mute your petty resentment.

A.J. Jacobs

Fortunately the City is vigilant. It too has its secret weapons. Since the summer it has released safety valves that form part of a wonderful mechanism, known only to itself. For the past three months we’ve noticed the most heartening appearance all over the place of eccentrics, more or less raving lunatics, cranks, and reinvigorating crackpots.

Jacques Yonnet

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