Quotes by Journalists - Page 105

When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him - as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, 'It was a privilege to have lived.' The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.
Daniel Klein
Appreciating what I have is my medicine.
Betty Jamie Chung
What I’ve learned is there’s a scientifically proven phenomenon that’s attached to gratitude, and that if you consciously take note of what is good in your life, quantifiable benefits happen.
Deborah Norville
It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.
Geraldine Brooks
As much as Jefferson loved France residence abroad gave him greater appreciation for his own nation. He was a tireless advocate for things American while abroad, and a promoter of things European while at home. Moving between two worlds, translating the best of the old into the new and explaining the benefits of the new to the old, he created a role for himself as both intermediary and arbiter.
Jon Meacham
Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.
Anna Quindlen
If you do believe in God, and your first instinct in all things must be gratitude: for creation, or love, for mercy.
Jonathan V Last
The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.
George F. Will
We are like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy.
Mark Helprin
Be encouraged. Hold your head up high and know God is in control and has a plan for you. Instead of focusing on all the bad, be thankful for all the good.
Germany Kent
Thanks, Pepe. You've put an extra night into my life. I would have spent it just sleeping like an ox, but I've lived it instead. I'm grateful.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Your Majesty, I'm afraid everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong," said Major Sir Michael Parker, an impresario for royal events with an expertise in pyrotechnics. "Oh good, what fun!" she replied with a smile.
Sally Bedell Smith
A universal truth of bicycling is this - pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
Robert Penn
My dear,In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.I realized, through it all, that…In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.Truly yours,Albert Camus”I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.
Albert Camus
Don't make excuses. Make commitments and stick to them.
Germany Kent
...I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the middle station had the fewest disasters,...
Daniel Defoe
I wondered what a man I had encountered the day before on the plane en route to Chicago's O'Hare airport would have made of this. As he tried to push through a crowded aisle, he said loudly: "Life is never easy. And it's never pleasant." I couldn't let this go. I looked up at him from my seat and said, "I do hope life gives you cause to change that opinion. Otherwise you may find that opinion walking ahead of you, giving you more and more reasons to believe it.
Robert Moss
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
Ernest Hemingway
The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.
Michael Lewis
You have a responsibility to act for others when you're the only person in a position to do so. It's how you handle it that separates the great from the mediocre.
Wilbert Rideau
I get it, you know. I'm operating on privilege too. It may be a number of notches down from yours but it's every bit as unearned. I think the trick is to never forget it.
Sabrina Vourvoulias
The Patriots had picked Brady in the sixth round, and he soon turned out to be one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the League, and absolutely perfect for the Belichick system and for the team's offense. So, as the team continued to make a series of very good calls on other player personnel choices, there was a general tendency to talk about how brilliant Pioli and Belichick were, and to regard Pioli as the best young player personnel man in the League. Just to remind himself not to believe all the hype and that he could readily have screwed up on that draft, Pioli kept on his desk a photo of Brady, along with a photo of the team's fifth-round traft choice, the man he had taken ahead of Brady: Dave Stachelski. He was a Tight End from Boise State who never a played a down for New England. Stachelski was taken with the 141st pick, Brady with the 199th one. 'If I was so smart,' Pioli liked to say, 'I wouldn't have risked an entire round of the draft in picking Brady.
David Halberstam
The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure.
H.L. Mencken
If the opposite of certainty is doubt, humility must lie somewhere between the two,
Ron Suskind
False humility is better than no humility at all.
Paul Krassner
He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.
Ernest Hemingway
The author points out strikingly different reactions to calamity. While many passengers of a devastating shipwreck were thankful to be alive, future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau saw his being spared as proof of his exceptionalism rather than of the grace from which he benefited.
Candice Millard
There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways.
George Orwell
The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.
David Halberstam
Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.
David Halberstam
Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.
David Halberstam
Men and women believed and proclaimed God was firmly on their side – and easy and shallow assertion that reduced God to a sort of house deity.
Gustav Niebuhr
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.
H.L. Mencken
It was easier to be the headstrong monk, a boy on a long-shot mission, before he actually won anything. With the prize in hand, he realized his single-minded drive came across as aloof cockiness; his painful martyrdom certainly looked like self-nomination for sainthood. He's not sure he can keep up this exhausting, aw-shucks façade for much longer.
Ron Suskind
Plimpton was a presence. He looked for ways in which he could make himself ridiculous. That made him a great storyteller.
Stefan Fatsis
They (Reagan and Kennedy) had some combination of cheerfulness and vulnerability that made them seem like boys on adventure who had become lost in needed a small kindness to get them back on the right path.
Scott Farris
Unlike Kim Cardassian or Donald Trump, Montaigne regarded the inward glance as an adventure in self-effacement not self infatuation. He was a charming and perceptive critic of his own foibles, especially alert to his weakness for inconsistency.
Danny Heitman
You hand over control, you start winning.
Jeff Jarvis
I still get plenty anxious. The weird thing, and the unpleasant surprise for me, of proceeding well into the middle, perhaps even post-prime of my career is that writing books has not got any easier. And that doesn't seem fair. I mean, I've been doing it so surely I should be getting better at it, at least a little bit blasé... And it seems to be working absolutely the opposite. This book [Big Brother] I had no confidence in the entirety of its composition, and I only decided I liked it when I finished the very final draft. This means I'm in a state of semi-misery for a long time. And I can't blithely seem either that's some little game I'm playing with myself because, you know, you can easily come along and you don't like what's you're writing for good reason. Right? So, yeah, it's very anxious making, I don't think it's so much the becoming a little more successful, I think it's becoming slightly more aware of how much has already been written, and just becoming less self-impressed as the years go by. More impressed with some people who are better than I am, but... It doesn't wow me that I can write a sentence any more. It has to be a really good sentence. And... I think that's what potentially leads to paralysis in late career, is a kind of killing humility.Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, on June 11, 2013
Lionel Shriver
He tried juggling with raw eggs – but only once.
Nicholas Dawidoff
Bob Dylan's Christianity has been allusive, idiosyncratic, and never the sort to place him on anyone's side in any Kulturkampf.
Christopher Caldwell
Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.
David Brooks
Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.
David Brooks
They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to prove anything to the world:
David Brooks
People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we are all built from “crooked timber”— from Immanuel Kant’s famous line, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
David Brooks
[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.
David Brooks
Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience— a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask.
Robert A. Caro
Nixon under pressure turned only to reporters from publications already favorable to him; Kennedy, in trouble, turned to those most critical and dubious of him, and if anything tended to take those already for him a bit for granted.
David Halberstam
They (the media) found little quality of depth to him, that when she said on the platform with that which he said to them in private. The qualities of introspection and reflectiveness that they particularly treasured were missing.
David Halberstam
Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.
David Halberstam
Culture is nested in context, not genes.
Thomas L. Friedman
Development is a voluntary process. You need a positive decision to make the right steps, but it starts with introspection.
Thomas L. Friedman
One world leader warned another "the error of relying on the capability you have rather than developing the capability you need.
Ron Suskind
He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.
Geraldine Brooks
David would wear no purple cloth, no symbols of his kingship, when he went to greet the ark. In its presence, we were all of us servants.
Geraldine Brooks
Thus in order to be a "radical" one must be open to the possibility that one's own core assumptions are misconceived.
Christopher Hitchens
He learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.
Frank Herbert
Economics has accurately been called the science of the single instance.
George F. Will
His core business still is self-promotion.
Joe Nocera
Life produces a different taste each time you take it.
Frank Herbert