Quotes by Journalists - Page 106

Pat Conroy embraced his new hometown with the grateful passion of a refugee.
William Grimes
Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.
Walter Isaacson
One of my biggest challenges is figuring out how to shoehorn my newfound knowledge into conversations.
A.J. Jacobs
While there are things about which one does not boast, there are others for which to be pitied would be all too humiliating.
Gaston Leroux
Humility is the recognition of your limitations, and it is from this understanding, and this understanding alone, that the drive comes to work hard at overcoming them.
John Carlin
I've never met a soldier who knew he was a hero. It's not false modesty. They simply decide to do something that they know they must do, usually for there comrades, because if they don't, those people will suffer in some way. For them, that compulsion is far stronger than any fear. The fact we find it exceptional is a sad indictment of the human race. I'd like to live in a world of heroes. If we did, there would be no wars.
Karen Traviss
The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. "I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?'" he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? "If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.
Michael Lewis
I had the chance to make every possible mistake and figure out a way to recover from it. Once you realize there is life after mistakes, you gain a self-confidence that never goes away.
Bob Schieffer
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
Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Women have rooms inside of us men cannot fathom. It’s where we store the depths of the hurt we’ve been dealt.Where we store the deep love we never want to lose.
Rachel Thompson
So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?”“Pretty much.
Matt Haig
For just this moment, he wanted her to see him for who he was, without the pity he knew she'd feel when she found out the truth.
Travis Neighbor Ward
We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain. We don't want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one's hands—like some dancer, in a trance, just put out one's hands—and touch all the people and tell them: I'm sorry. I love you. Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. But we can't. We can't. On the little life raft of Mark only one other person could fit. Just one! And so, thwarted, we inflict pain. That’s what we do. We do not keep each other company. We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we'll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone.
Keith Gessen
He closed the makeshift plywood door, sealing the space so Ethan would not have to hear any sounds from the outside world: not the voices of men, not the scream of steam engines as they arrived at the nearby station. The only sounds would be of their bodies breathing, of their clothes rustling, of skin moving against soft skin.The shack was small and humble, but it was cozy and private, and lit with a light that did not seem to come entirely from the lantern. Afterword, Ethan wept, and Love whispered things meant to make him feel safe. Were it possible, he would have traded his immortality to remain with this beautiful soul, to concentrate all that love on a human who needed it so.
Martha Brockenbrough
Pain is not to be buried away, in my mother’s book: you stomp and rave until it hurts a little less." -Buzzfeed Article
Bim Adewunmi
He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.
Ernest Hemingway
[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West
I walked to the bookcase and examined the storybooks inside. As a girl, I had dreamed of having stacks of books at my disposal--stories to get lost in, other worlds to live in when mine was so bleak.
Sarah Jio
His face clouded over when Calvin and Peachy tried to explain women. Peachy pressed on bravely. “Now, the purpose of the vagina,” he was saying. He stopped and said to Calvin, “Why can’t we just buy him a book?
David Pratt
Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.
Nicholas Carr
The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.— Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475
Norman Cousins
‎"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly.""really?" said Sarge. "what flavor?
John Connolly
Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.
Mark Kurlansky
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Sid Ziff
In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will there be another super-superman to follow and another super-super-superman after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline come after, with return down the long line, through the superman down to man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether, and empty space?
H.L. Mencken
Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve.
Chip Walter
They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless.
Vasily Grossman
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
Matt Ridley
The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth - that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom.
Quammen
Insularity plus time yields divergence.
Quammen
Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.more than a rounding error.
Elizabeth Kolbert
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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
We are only fully human when we act as if the life beyond us matters.
Caspar Henderson
Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.
David Quammen
For great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.
Michael Pollan
Evolutionary biology is imperialistic, overtaking entire fields of endeavor simply by attaching the prefix bio – or neuro -- to their names: bioethics, no comics, even, God help us, neurotheology. Its logic is deployed against helpless laymen as a bully's truncheon or an argument stopper.
Andrew Ferguson
Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life.
Andrew Ferguson
Evolution taught us that adaptation is the key to survival.
Gemma Malley
There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two – predictable calories from women and occasional protein from men – and you get the best of both worlds. At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer. That very fact makes it easier for them to spend more time chasing deer and so makes it more likely they will catch one. Everybody gains – gains from trade. It is as if the species now has two brains and two stores of knowledge instead of one – a brain that learns about hunting and a brain that learns about gathering.
Matt Ridley
We share a common ancestor with chimps that is not shared by mandrills, we share a common ancestor with mandrills that is not shared by bushbabies, and on and on and on, to the ancestor we share with nematode worms that is not shared with oak trees.
Simon Barnes
The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian’s Doug Erwin, is that we can’t predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors."There will be plenty of surprises. Let’s face it: who would’ve predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn’t exist, no vertebrate biologist would’ve suggested that anything would do that: he’d have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.
Alan Weisman
According to Lamarck, there was a force—the ‘power of life’—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.
Elizabeth Kolbert
His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.
Elizabeth Kolbert
...avacados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts.
Adam Leith Gollner
Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the "goal" of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal is that the organism be left under the impression that we've helped; the impression alone is enough to bring the reciprocation.
Robert Wright
Love, I have always known, is an evolutionary trait. It is a delicately tuned, intricate, sensitive impulse, but a trait nevertheless, a reaction honed by millions of years of an ever-changing and complex mating instinct.
David Bajo
A four-letter alphabet called DNA.
Matt Ridley
I've been in love for five hundred million years…
Italo Calvino
When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.
Italo Calvino
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H.L. Mencken
Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
Ian Fleming
...I committed a sin the day I refused you - I discovered metal inside me where my heart should be - forgive me, Love, for acting on principles...
John Geddes
Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune...
José Saramago
The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.
Malcolm Muggeridge
He [Muffat] experienced a sense of pleasure mingled with remorse, the sort of pleasure peculiar to those Catholics whom the fear of hell spurs on to commit sin.
Émile Zola
The more grievous the sin, the greater the repentance, God was bidding His time.
Émile Zola
The modern skeptical world has been taught for some 200 years a conception of human nature in which the reality of evil, so well-known to the age of faith, has been discounted. Almost all of us grew up in an environment of such easy optimism that we can scarcely know what is meant, though our ancestors knew it well, by the satanic will. We shall have to recover this forgotten but essential truth ‑ along with so many others that we lost when, thinking we were enlightened and advanced, we were merely shallow and blind.
Walter Lippmann
Sin is not just what the catechism says it is. Sin is not simply that which we commit. Sin is also what we desire but are too weak to do.
Sándor Márai