Quotes by Journalists - Page 122

Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn't — not because it's optimistic, but because it can't take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is Absurdism. A postmodern magazine may be irreverent, but not bitterly irreverent, for it's not purposefully irreverent; its aim is indiscriminate, because everyone is equally ridiculous. And anyway, there's no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.
Robert Wright
Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence — legitimately — our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature — by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse — we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature — natural selection — gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy.
Robert Wright
The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on ‘our side’. Is it?
Christopher Hitchens
I try to construct a theory of how a moral person should live in these circumstances, and how such a person should love.
Charles Bowden
Aspire to decency. Practice civility toward one another. Admire and emulate ethical behavior wherever you find it. Apply a rigid standard of morality to your lives; and if, periodically, you fail ­ as you surely will ­ adjust your lives, not the standards.
Ted Koppel
It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American
Naomi Wolf
The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as then social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved.
José Saramago
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
Albert Camus
I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
Katherine Boo
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
Ernest Hemingway
If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?
David Wong
He stared dully at the desolate, cold road and the pale, dead night. Nothing was colder or more dead than his heart. He had loved an angel and now he despised a woman.
Gaston Leroux
One trouble with being efficient is that it makes everybody hate you so.
Bob Edwards
But in terms of "psychological" time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by ancient grudges, controlled by obsolete prejudices, driven by buried fears.
Sydney J. Harris
Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.
Sydney J. Harris
The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is that it forces us to think and talk and feel in terms of abstractions—those "communists" this time, those "fascists" last time. But those we are fighting and killing are people—men, women and children—not political, geographic or economic abstractions. They are, in the main, as decent and fearful and confused as we are. And they regard us as abstractions as much as we do them.
Sydney J. Harris
They hate us because we don't even know why they hate us.
John Powers
The difference between politics and religion is that the first makes it legal to hate, and makes the love of the second illegal.
Rebecca McKinsey
One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do…
Russell Baker
If I loved you for no reasons I will hate you for more reasons
Yasser Hakeem
I knew then what I had done. I had killed a man. I had killed a man to get a woman. I had put myself in her power, so there was one person in the world that could point a a finger at me, and I would have to die. I had done all that for her, and I never want to see her again as long as I lived. That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate.
James M. Cain
I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.
Aleksandar Hemon
She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Most hate is more common and more complicated, with as many varieties as there are varieties of love. Just as there is possessive love and needy love; family love and friendship; romantic love and unrequited love; passion and respect, affection and obsession, so hatred has its shadings. There is hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is hate that expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness; there is revenge, and there is hate that comes from envy. There is hate that was love, and hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the other, and hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There is the oppressor's hate, and the victim's hate. There is hate that burns slowly, and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that never catches fire.
Andrew Sullivan
hate generalizes, love specifies
Gloria Steinem
In the absence of ancient hatreds, chauvinism can easily rustle up modern ones.
Samanth Subramanian
Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.
Matt Haig
You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them,” [Jeannette's mom] said. “You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.”“Oh yeah?” I said. “How about Hitler? What was his redeeming quality?”“Hitler loved dogs,” Mom said without hesitation.
Jeannette Walls
Hate is contagious. A few seconds after Donald Trump has told me something hateful, somebody else repeats it. He has legitimized what people only dare say in their kitchens and bedrooms.
Jorge Ramos
You kill one, there was another in his place, and what's worse, his nephew now hated you, his friend now hated you. . . . There was no end.
Juliana Barbassa
We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.
John Howard Griffin
Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born negro, has written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel entitled "Native Son".
David L. Cohn
Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.
Rebecca McKinsey
Hate born from too many tears and too little Love
Fred Rosen
Hate and love are reciprocal passions.
Gabriel García Márquez
I hate myself pretty often" .She tilted her face back on the pillow, damning tears and attempting so smile at the same time. "Pretty fucking often
Jim Lynch
But sometimes we crave the love of those we’re afraid to hate.
Anthony Breznican
She looks at me, square in the eye. Taking aim. And then she pulls the trigger. “Because I hated you.”The wind, the noise, it all just goes quiet for a second, and I’m left with a dull ringing in my ear, like after a show, like after a heart monitor goes to flatline.“Hated me? W
Gayle Forman
The bubbly play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men when glass in hand they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse.
Jack London
I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe.
Hunter S. Thompson
Ragging at its most harmless is embarrassing and silly, but at its worst, it attempts to prevent individual students from independent thinking, attempts, in fact, to eradicate freewill
Debalina Haldar
I rather enjoy being contradicted. It forces me to think harder.
Gemma Malley
It is almost possible to sum up the whole process of thinking as the occurrence of suggestions for the solution of difficulties and the testing out of those suggestions. The suggestions or suppositions are tested by observation,memory, experiment.
Henry Hazlitt
To think at all requires a purpose, no matter how vague. The best thinking, however, requires a definite purpose, and the more definite this purpose the more definite will be our thinking. Therefore in taking up any special line of thought, we must first find just what our end or purpose is, and thus get clearly in mind what our problems are.
Henry Hazlitt
But in the Gulf you got time. And I'm figuring all the time. I've got to think right all the time. I can't make a mistake. Not a mistake. Not once. Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to do and something to think about besides wondering what the hell's going to happen. Besides wondering what's going to happen to the whole damn thing.
Ernest Hemingway
Writing is a never ending journey for me - not only for my own comfort, but as a strong medium for encouraging a healthy process of constructive thinking among my readers
Debalina Haldar
The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
If you wanted to know what a man was thinking, check the view from his favorite spot.
Robert Ferrigno
Thinking of it, and doing it… they're not the same.
Robert Ferrigno
Stop thinking. I've stopped some 15 years ago. Otherwise, if you will be thinking you won't want to live. Everyone who thinks is unhappy.
Sergei Dovlatov
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?.... In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
George Orwell
When something becomes hard to think about, people transfer the discomfort of the thought, to the object of their thinking.
Derek Thompson
A lot of what people did and said when they "predicted" things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure".
Michael Lewis
After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.
Michael Lewis
Stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them...what people remember about the past, [Kahneman and Tversky] suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.
Michael Lewis
You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That's when you need to stop and check your thinking...Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, 'He's just drunk,' and you'll miss the subdural hematoma.
Michael Lewis
Stay positive. Sometimes you don't even realize you're blocking your own blessings by thinking negatively and holding on to the past. Learn to let go.
Germany Kent
To think is to be sick...
Djuna Barnes
We become, neurologically, what we think."(33)
Nicholas Carr
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
Christopher Hitchens