Quotes by Journalists - Page 44

The conversation limped along this line of thought much like a zombie: lifeless and mindless and making a jelly of whatever healthy brains were within its reach.

Steve Hockensmith

Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.

George Orwell

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

Joan Didion

Money never remains just coins and pieces of paper. Money can be translated into the beauty of living a support in misfortune an education or future security.

Sylvia Porter

A question for Christians who accept evolution: When did we gain a "soul"? Did Homo habilis have a soul? Homo ergaster? Did God only spontaneously add a soul when we evolved into Homo sapiens?

David G. McAfee

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war's appeal.

Chris Hedges

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;

Albert Camus

We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep…

José Saramago

It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.

Albert Camus

had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins

George Orwell

If there was a party, everyone in turn would come sit next to me to regale me with how he or sh thought I should live and what I deserved to have. What it boiled down to was that I should live like them. Elvire, one half of a tightly knit couple would forget that her husband was clinically depressed. Guillaume, married to a harpy, maintained that if one laid low and said amen to everything, things worked out. Maria, fed up to the teeth with her children, wanted me to have my own. Assia loved women but it was killing her mother. Patrizio had bruises on his shoulders from his chronically jealous wife. Not one of them could stand my singleness, because it could have been theirs.

Sophie Fontanel

...The reason why we’re strippers, is invariably more boring, more grounded in nonexistential needs like money—and pragmatic concerns, like money.

Ruth Fowler

...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

Italo Calvino

I never bought into the whole “second amendment” argument as it relates to the 21st century. Originally, it was put into place for the simple reason that our forefathers were fighting or had just fought off a government that threatened them with weapons. If those in the revolution had no weapons, there would be no United States of America, but rather New England of the New World. So, I understood why they thought it was so important.

Martin Manley

Because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we all have become lazy. Lazy people are like cancer. They spread. Before you know it, the entire country is destroyed.

Tahir Shah

...if you don't regard your word as a sacred covenant, then there is nothing in you I can honor ...

John Geddes

Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.

Peter Heller

Today, if you pay a[n US] dollar for a pound of apples in the supermarketm only about six cents covers the farmwork used to get it there; (...)

Tracie McMillan

Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations-plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology.

Norman Cousins

A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set us a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific text-book, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact.

George Orwell

The real triumph of the state occurs when its subjects refer to it as “we,” like football fans talking about the home team.

Joseph Sobran

Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

David Kenyon Webster

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

George Orwell

How can you cry for others’ struggles when you are facilitating mayhem in your own land?

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

They took they hit the cobblestone streets to look at churches, with Isabella wearing suede Manolos. "She's breaking her legs and I tell her it's just ridiculous and that she had to get some proper shoes." She bought and put on a pair of espadrilles and promptly broke into tears. "I can't. I can't. Everytime I look down on my feet I feel so depressed." Roberts said, "Well, are you going to be depressed or are you going to have a broken ankle?" "I am going to have a broken ankle" she said and she threw the shoes away.

Lauren Goldstein Crowe

I found myself speaking more slowly (in an attempt to obey the Bible in speech), as if I was speaking French instead of English.

A.J. Jacobs

I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.

Ernest Hemingway

Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.

Dame Rebecca West

I only had to drop acid once to know that Timothy Leary was right about questioning authority.Motorcycling is like life. There's nothing solid about it. Something not even the asphalt under your tires.Time on a motorcycle is unlike time spent anywhere else. There are moments lost in the landscape, seconds devoted solely to balance, and long stretches spent spiraling inward.

Barbara Schoichet

A friend is one who withholds judgment no matter how long you have his unanswered letter.

Sophie Irene Loeb

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.

Boris Johnson

...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

Chuck Klosterman

To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood

Tushar Upreti

Look, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different,' he insisted, 'is the detail. If we loose the detail, we loose it all.

Neal Gabler

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.

Katherine Anne Porter

One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.

Richard Brookhiser

I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future.

Phillip Adams

Failure is that early morning hour of darkness which precedes the dawning of the day of success.

Leigh Mitchell Hodges

What do you believe in?’ asked David.‘I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?

John Connolly

KNOW YOUR DOPE FIEND. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of the Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command-including yours. BEWARE. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you. Good luck.-The Chief

Hunter S. Thompson

When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.

Algernon Blackwood

...you don't need a calling to minister love...

John Geddes

The Zionists accepted the partition plan. The AHC and the Arab states rejected any proposal to share the land and vowed to drown the fledging Jewish state in rivers of blood.

Sol Stern

She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe.

Jeannette Walls

Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe.In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees.

Mark Gevisser

When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.

Nicholas Kristof

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

Miguel Syjuco

What white middle America loathes these days are poor and poorish people, especially the kind who look and sound like they just might live in a house trailer. They will swear on a stack of Lands' End catalogs that they are not bigots, but, human nature being what it is, we are all kicking someone else's dog around, whether we admit it or not.

Joe Bageant

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.

Walt Whitman

I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.

Marcus Garvey

Couples with children may argue more, the author suggests, because children are a reminder of just how crucial our choices are.

Jennifer Senior

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

Joan Didion

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.

Julian Assange

Camerado this is no book. Who touches this touches a man.

Walt Whitman

But I find it necessary to repeat in this particular place that the division into classes, which is so salient a part of modern demonology, had, and has, little significance for primitive man or for the peasant in a comparatively low state of mental development. To such people, spirits of all kinds - fairies, the ghosts of the dead, and even witches and water-kelpies - are all creatures of the supernatural class between which he scarcely differentiates.

Lewis Spence

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Believe nothing. Try everything.

Sally Brampton

I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.

Jon Ronson

Kind eyes under all the mascara.

Jojo Moyes

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

Brenda Ueland

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