Quotes by Journalists - Page 125

Believe it or not, philosophy has consequences.
Jonathan V Last
Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.
Italo Calvino
Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence.
David Halberstam
Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.
David Halberstam
Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians,
David Halberstam
If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.
David Halberstam
Education was central to reporting.
David Halberstam
The author says that one of the difficulties of modern parenting is the uncertainty of what parents are preparing children for. In traditional societies this was clear, as parents prepared children for a society and for roles much like their own. She writes, "There is no folk wisdom.
Jennifer Senior
How youMore people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself.
Thomas L. Friedman
The road itself tells us far more than signs do.
Tom Vanderbilt
I'm Jewish in the way Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.
A.J. Jacobs
One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.
Richard Brookhiser
Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.
Richard Brookhiser
This is not an issue of geography. He IS of two worlds wherever he goes.
Ron Suskind
Disequilibrium is often instigated by the will to power, a sleepless drive in the human personality to control others, to force them to do what one wants, or not to do what one opposes.
Ron Suskind
Islam is in a formative period struggling to consolidate the vast reach won by both inspiration and force at its founding. Two centuries along, the faith of Muhammad hangs like an intricate veil: a religion still searching for institutional wholeness, a set of lessons to live by.
Ron Suskind
A Pakistani exchange student's maternal American host "managed to summon the transforming question of her culture, built on the revolutionary idea that people are the sovereign, the boss, captains of their own fate.She said, simply, "But what do YOU think?
Ron Suskind
From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.
George F. Will
Politics is always driven by competing worries.
George F. Will
A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past.
George F. Will
We look at the Ark of the Covenant and remember who we are.
Geraldine Brooks
In the context of today, this WAS heroism.
John Howard Griffin
Violence is violence and can in no way be misconstrued as discipline under any circumstance cultural or otherwise.
Aysha Taryam
Liberalism is not fond of fun, or at least of many forms of fun that many people like.
George F. Will
In Gladstone's mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.
George F. Will
Enough anecdotes make a pattern.
George F. Will
Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty
John Howard Griffin
Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer
Mark Kurlansky
A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory.
Mark Kurlansky
John Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself.
Tony Horwitz
Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system.
A.J. Jacobs
you're deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn't just read it on Wikipedia. There's a difference between tradition and culture.
Lauren Beukes
Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted other than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together.
Colin Woodard
Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears.
Jon Katz
You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? ‘Never complain, never explain.
Amanda Craig
I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, “Put a jumper on
Amanda Craig
The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe.The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori.Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves.The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible.
Chris Hedges
I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.
Joan Didion
Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.
Derek Thompson
It is nine o'clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they might their pre-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven o'clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James's, upon whom one, two, and three o'clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon. I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information, when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole per mensem for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict jackets, that some M'Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky ; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, covered with that circular layer - abominable disc! - of oleaginous nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that surrounds the truffle bedecked pate  de  foie gras. Say, Elizabeth Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat, game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine o'clock breakfasts.
George Augustus Sala
Kaminski plunged ahead. "I am not going to sign off on anything related to the Raptors," he said. "And I don't care if I'm fired for it."Buy raised a hand. "Whoa, wait a minute, I don't think you'll be fired," he replied quickly. "Now that Skilling's gone, we have a different mantra in Enron."He looked Kaminski in the eye. "We're expected to be honest", he said.p.525
Kurt Eichenwald
Excuse me, Ben," Bowen said. "Am I wrong, or aren't you the corporate treasurer?"Glisan bristled. "Yes.""What do you mean, you think you can get one?" Bowen shot back. "This is the current fucking maturities schedule! Go get it. You have to have a maturities schedule!"But they didn't. With all the focus on deals and earnings- with finance group's transformation into a profit center rather than a division to support the business- the workday, boring details had been sloughed off.p. 560
Kurt Eichenwald
Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I realise I have become something I never thought possible: patriotic and proud about being an adopted Italian. In more honest moments, I realise that I might never quite be able to leave the country. That longing to leave, and the inability to pull yourself away from the bel casino, the 'fine mess', has been written about for centuries. Using the usual prostitution metaphor, one of the country's most important patriots, Massimo D'Azeglio, wrote: 'I can't live outside Italy, which is strange because I continually get angry with Italian ineptitude, envies, ignorance and laziness. I'm like one of the people who falls in love with a prostitute.' That, in fact, is precisely the feeling of living here: it is infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to pull yourself away. It's not just that everything is troppo bello, 'too beautiful', or that food and conversation are so good. It's that life seems less exciting outside Italy, the emotions seem muted. Stendhal wrote that the feeling one gets from living in Italy is 'akin to that of being in love', and it's easy to understand what he meant. There's the same kind of enchantment and serenity, occasionally insecurity and sadness. And writing about the country's sharp pangs of jealousy and paranoia, Stendhal knew that they exist precisely because the country's 'joys are far more intense and more lasting'. You can't have one without the other.
Tobias Jones
Enron was becoming a virtual cult of creativity, often placing swagger over substance. New ideas were celebrated for their newness, for their potential; tried and true businesses like the pipelines were almost derided.
Kurt Eichenwald
Enron would keep its unearned windfall, generated solely because David Duncan didn't know what he was doing.
Kurt Eichenwald
...Fastow had found someone trusting and pliable.Fastow wanted a pupet, Bowen concluded, and he already controlled Ben Glisan's strings.p.338
Kurt Eichenwald
A eureka moment. It suddenly struck Mintz as so obvious. The executives entrusted with reviewing all of the LJM transactions- Causey, Buy, the board- approached their duties casually, giving everything just the onceover. They seemed to figure that somebody else was doing the tough analysis. But no one was.p.389
Kurt Eichenwald
In a market, preceptions could be as important as reality.p.403
Kurt Eichenwald
When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil?
Nick Joaquín
When art as an expression starts to appear, without prompting, all over the suburbs and villages of this country, what we are saying is: we are confident enough to create our own living, our own entertainment, our own aesthetic. Such an aesthetic will not be donated to us from the corridors of a university; or from the Ministry of Culture, or by the French Cultural Centre. It will come from the individual creations of a thousand creative people
Binyavanga Wainaina
Why does it seem easier for us to accept reality when it is within the confinement of the animal kingdom yet so hard for us to face it in our?
Aysha Taryam
Never make the mistake of thinking you are alone — or inconsequential. Ignorance is voluntary and confusion is temporary. You see the world as-is, which is more than can be said for the vast populace.
Rebecca McKinsey
My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.
Tahir Shah
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
Tahir Shah
At the dealership, I pulled out the sieve and toyed with it threateningly. When the salesman was ready for me, I held it up, told him I was not a tourist and demanded a large discount.
Tahir Shah
We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye.
Nick Joaquín
[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.
Christopher Hitchens
The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.
Julian Assange
Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.
Rebecca McKinsey