Quotes by Journalists - Page 42

In this world where I sit at my desk writing these words, people die, they pass on, people are mortal. In the cyber world we inhabit they do not.

Aysha Taryam

going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside—to say, ‘This is the way it was.’

John McPhee

Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.

Geraldine Brooks

When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.

Murray Kempton

There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.

Christopher Hitchens

Please don't grow up to be one of those men who lie for the sport of it, and most men do. That's a fact. That's why the world is so messed up, Noah. That's why history books are full of so much heartache, and tragedy. Politicians, dictators, kings, phoney-baloney preachers-most of 'em are men, and most of 'em lie like rugs

Carl Hiaasen

As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu’s death was not a profit-generating enterprise.

Katherine Boo

Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.

Geraldine Brooks

If there is anything worse than evil, it is nothingness. At least evil has a form, and a voice, and a purpose, however depraved. Perhaps some good can even come out of evil: a terrible deed of violence against someone weaker may lead others to act in order to ensure that such a deed is not perpetrated again, whereas before they might have been unaware of the reasons why an individual might behave in such a way, or they might simply have chosen to ignore them. And evil, as we saw with the Blacksmith, always contains within itself the possibility of its own redemption. It is not evil that is the enemy of hope: it is nothingness.

John Connolly

People aren't often asked to make life or death decisions. There are no causes to die for. You can go through life never knowing which of your friends would really come through for you

Bella Pollen

Unlike a variety of other relationships,friendship requires an acknowledgement by both parties that they are involved or it fails to exist.

Andrew Sullivan

... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...

John Geddes

…is there anyone so deaf that he cannot hear in Byzantine churches some echo of the Catacombs? What could be more natural than that just as martyrs made paintings for martyrs, latter-day bureaucrats paint for bureaucrats?

Miklos Haraszti

At the end of a century that has seenthe evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies,the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

Joseph Sobran

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes to increase luxury and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

Henry George

Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.

Paul Johnson

Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.

Christopher Morley

Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.

David Brooks

What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.

Albert Camus

[He] made me feel lonely, and being alone with another person is much worse than being alone all by yourself.

Lindy West

In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy . It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.

George Orwell

To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.

Christopher Hitchens

Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong

Kathryn Schulz

As one widow put it to me, “Strength doesn’t mean being able to stand up to anything, but being able to crawl on your belly a long, long time before you can stand up again.

Mark Matousek

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

Joan Didion

God is that force that drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and care for each other and respond to each other. And for me, that is actually enough. That cultivating it, that thinking about it, worshipping it, working towards it, taking care of it, nurturing it in myself, nurturing it in other people, that really is a life’s work right there, and it doesn’t have to be any bigger than that. God doesn’t have to be out in the next solar system over bashing asteroids together. It’s plenty, just the God that I work with.” Kate Braestrup

Krista Tippett

The truth was that I didn't know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and then returns it to that corner, now knowing that it was there by casual chance, until slowly that corner becomes its hallowed place, where you can always find the broom - just as all traditions begin as accidents, how the borders of countries are formed, how we marry, how we make friends and children - so, until Oxford, had I lived, within a sequence of non decisions, and yet with the same misdirected conviction of intentionality with which humans infuse their errors and felicities alike.

Charles Finch

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

Hunter S. Thompson

You can't stay here any more. My fears have been irrational and they've forced me to make unwise decisions and accept the unacceptable.

Dorothy Koomson

Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.

Herbert Kaufman

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

Jack London

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.

Christopher Hitchens

I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.

Nigel Slater

There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You've ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can't say any of that.

Gayle Forman

I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

Ernest Hemingway

A spirit of satirical frivolity so dominated Britain in the 1960s that one critic feared the country "would sink giggling into the sea.

John O'Sullivan

When a pebble is thrown into a lake, everything, down to the furthermost depths, moves with it. ... And if, afterwards, everything seems as it was, the level of the lake has none the less been raised by imperceptible, incalculable degree. The old order has been overthrown -- by a pebble.

Théophile Thoré

...when it comes to defining adulthood, nothing has made me feel more grown-up than knowing that one of the two people in the world who loved me the most, without condition, was no longer in the world.

Jean Hannah Edelstein

Corruption,' Jordan Belfort believes, 'is endemic to human being. I mean, even men in monasteries - where enticement is hard to come by – even men in those circumstances have sex with other men and abuse children. Look at the Catholic Church! Man is an imperfect animal and he is corruptible, okay? And in finance, the liquid nature of the market makes corruption very easy. On Wall Street, this liquidity is so in your face -' he suddenly grits his teeth - 'that if you have even the slightest predisposition to the dark side, you become corrupted. In addition to which, those attracted to Wall Street have a predisposition to greed.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Nothing kills creativity faster than a wall.

Eric Weiner

We can all have plenty of lives, but there are limits. You never can tell what they are.

Colm Tóibín

Because, from the beginning , God said, 'I'm gonna put this world into your hands. If I run everything, then that's not you.' So we were created with a piece of divinity inside us, but with this thing called free will, and I think God watches us everyday, lovingly, praying we will make the right choices.

Mitch Albom

He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself

Djuna Barnes

You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be -I had a mother who read to me

Strickland W. Gillilan

...strands of your hair and tendrils of the wind spin into nothingness the memories of that day...

John Geddes

...Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant...

Gary Taubes

Time is measured in meaning

Rene Denfeld

...being with you was so easy and natural - there was no strain - I never had to guard my words...

John Geddes

Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.

Lev Grossman

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

Nancy Mitford

It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

Frank Herbert

But how a game plan came to be, what a finished plan looked like, I had no idea. I’d heard that all copies were shredded as soon as the game was over.

Nicholas Dawidoff

Dare to be an optimist.

Matt Ridley (Author)

Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins, or chicken-pox scars, or their glasses are too big. I know I'm being mean. But you know, they're just sort of at the edge of everything.

Lev Grossman

It's important to be smart, but it's also important to be active with your intelligence. The more you sit around over-thinking things, the more trouble you get into.

Alisa Valdes

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

Albert Camus

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what's at stake isn't a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

Lewis H. Lapham

I have a pretty good handle on my anxiety. I basically treat myself like a nervy horse: lots of exercise, lots of sleep, lots of interesting work to keep my mind occupied, and generally avoiding being ridden hard by strangers.

Caitlin Moran

The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.

Jon Ronson

If you do not have control over your mouth, you will not have control over your future.

Germany Kent

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