Quotes by Journalists - Page 128

The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.
Laurence Gonzales
The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.
Brooks Atkinson
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices--just recognize them.
Edward R. Murrow
Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
Even this shall pass away
Theodore Tilton
I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
Joyce Kilmer
The words of the true poems give you more than poems, they give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, & everything else, they balance the ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, they do not seek beauty, they are sought, forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death, yet they are not the finish, but rather the outset, they bring none of his or her terminus or to be content & full, whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of the stars, to learn one of the meanings, to launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings & never be quiet again.
Walt Whitman
The IdealThis is where I came from.I passed this way.This should not be shameful Or hard to say.A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respectWhat he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal.This is hard.
James Fenton
DO IT NOWIf with pleasure you are viewingany work a man is doing,If you like him or you love him,tell him now;Don’t withhold your approbationtill the parson makes orationAnd he lies with snowy lilies on his brow;No matter how you shout ithe won’t really care about it;He won’t know how many teardrops you have shed;If you think some praise is due himnow’s the time to slip it to him,For he cannot read his tombstone when he’s dead.More than fame and more than moneyis the comment kind and sunnyAnd the hearty, warm approval of a friend.For it gives to life a savor,and it makes you stronger, braver,And it gives you heart and spirit to the end;If he earns your praise – bestow it,if you like him let him know it,Let the words of true encouragement be said;Do not wait till life is overand he’s underneath the clover,For he cannot read his tombstone when he’s dead.
Burton Braley
But the rare herb, Forgetfulness, / It hides away from me.
Jeanne Robert Foster
ILikeThe WayThat when youTiltPoemsOn their sideTheyLook likeMiniatureCities FromA long wayAway. SkyscrapersMade outOfWords.
Matt Haig
Iron helmets will not save/Even heroes from the grave/Good man's blood will drain away/While the wickid win the day.
Heinrich Heine
I find placebos uplifting and exhilarating. It means that taking action--no matter what the action is--might help you feel better.
A.J. Jacobs
Think, speak, and act. With age comes self-reproach: I might have done more. Therefore now do!
Théophile Thoré
He was of the mold from which great men are made. Having said of anything 'Let it be done' he at once felt not only that it was accomplished, but that he had done it himself.
Heywood Broun
He had no tolerance for acts of betrayal or cruelty and lacked Angelo's taste for the minute details of a business deal. He was a man totally in the moment, who knew only to respond to the action with an action. He was a pure gangster.
Lorenzo Carcaterra
Gangsters live for the action. The closer to death, the nearer to the heated coil of the moment, the more alive they feel. Most would rather succumb to a barrage of bullets from a roomful of sworn enemies than to the debilitation of old age, dying the death of the feeble. A gangster becomes as addicted to the thrill of the battle and the potential to die in the midst of it as he does to he more attractive lures in his path. In his world, the potential for death exists every day. The better gangsters don't shy away from such a dreaded possibility but rather find comfort in its proximity.
Lorenzo Carcaterra
We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill.
Albert Camus
Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action.
W.J. Cameron
It is not, how one thinks. Indeed, it is, how one executes that.
Ehsan Sehgal
Remember what happened last time with the 'cuda.
Carl Hiaasen
Who is this man?''Chinaman, or rather half Chinese and half German. Got a daft name. Calls himself Doctor No - Doctor Julius No.''No? Spelt like Yes?''That's right.
Ian Fleming
...Right now there's a pair of bad cops on their way out here to shoot me.""You don't know that.""Yeah, you're right," Stranahan said. "They're probably just collecting Toys for Tots. Now go.
Carl Hiaasen
Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. "I never knew a girl to have such gumption," she'd say. "But I'm not too sure it's a good thing.
Jeannette Walls
Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)
Jon Meacham
I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
Dorothy Day
The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?
Robert Cormier
Never confuse movement with action.
Ernest Hemingway
It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
Frank Herbert
The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times. The formula for telling a powerful story has remained the same: create a strong character, a person of great strengths, capable of deep emotions and decisive action. Give him a weakness. Set him in conflict with another powerful character -- or perhaps with nature. Let his exterior conflict be the mirror of the protagonist's own interior conflict, the clash of his desires, his own strength against his own weakness. And there you have a story. Whether it's Abraham offering his only son to God, or Paris bringing ruin to Troy over a woman, or Hamlet and Claudius playing their deadly game, Faust seeking the world's knowledge and power -- the stories that stand out in the minds of the reader are those whose characters are unforgettable.To show other worlds, to describe possible future societies and the problems lurking ahead, is not enough. The writer of science fiction must show how these worlds and these futures affect human beings. And something much more important: he must show how human beings can and do literally create these future worlds. For our future is largely in our own hands. It doesn't come blindly rolling out of the heavens; it is the joint product of the actions of billions of human beings. This is a point that's easily forgotten in the rush of headlines and the hectic badgering of everyday life. But it's a point that science fiction makes constantly: the future belongs to us -- whatever it is. We make it, our actions shape tomorrow. We have the brains and guts to build paradise (or at least try). Tragedy is when we fail, and the greatest crime of all is when we fail even to try.Thus science fiction stands as a bridge between science and art, between the engineers of technology and the poets of humanity.
Ben Bova
I can't go back," said Towser. "Nor I," said Fowler. "They would turn me back into a dog," said Towser. "And me," said Fowler, "back into a man.
Clifford D. Simak
You cannot hide from the world. It will find you. It always does. And now it has found me. My split second of immortality is over. All that's left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has.
Drew Magary
I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.
Frank Herbert
We're in America; why do I have to "Press 1" for English?
Allan Hall
Humans would never tell the simple truth when a lie was available....
Karen Traviss
God exists. He has one wicked since of humor, and right now he’s having a grand old time punking the planet.
Forrest Carr
I killed a couple of people,” Scooter said. “Wanna play cards?
Forrest Carr
You can scoff at opinions. You can reject hypotheses. You can discard theories out of hand. But you cannot reject the facts
Forrest Carr
John raised an eyebrow. “So you wouldn’t date someone like you?”“Oh, hell, no. I’m insane, but that would be nuts.
Forrest Carr
Sanity is over-rated. It lacks color.
Forrest Carr
What’s more insane? Hearing imaginary voices? Or not hearing the real ones?
Forrest Carr
Guns are not the problem. The species is the problem.
Forrest Carr
We don’t go in for that psychodynamic stuff around here. Those guys will talk you to death, clean out your bank account while they are doing it, and then invite you to come back and express your innermost feelings about being broke.
Forrest Carr
Powell’s face appeared on screen. “It’s true, the doomsday crowd is a little crazy,” she said, looking thoughtful. “But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Forrest Carr
Humanity is a spectator sport. God is the spectator.
Forrest Carr
God exists. He has one wicked sense of humor, and right now he’s having a grand old time punking the planet.
Forrest Carr
Nothing is harder on the nerves than hope.
Forrest Carr
You can not go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after.
Frank Herbert
Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common.
Lawrence Wright
Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.
Frank Herbert
They compose poems to their knives.
Frank Herbert
I trade with you my mind.
Clifford D. Simak
The ultimate downfall of the computerized holographic receptionist was that there was no amount of flattery, flirtation or chocolate that could convince one to lie for you.
Scott B. Pruden
Nothing helps your partner keep his mind on Jesus more than having a sign of His love tanned on your primary erogenous zones.
Scott B. Pruden
I am a leg of the death tripod that will destroy our foes.
Frank Herbert
By the standards of a tourist strolling past looking for a quick lunch, the place was a dive. The sign on the window was small and easy to miss, and the antique feel of the place wasn't the prepackaged, old-shit-on-the-wall nostalgia that came with so many chain restaurants. The cafe was just old, and everything about it said old. But Jon liked it that way, if only because it kept the tourists away and spared him from hearing imported ignorance when there was plenty of local ignorance to go around.
Scott B. Pruden
I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.—John Cavil, Cylon Model Number One, “No Exit
Patrick Di Justo
Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults.
Alvin Toffler
He who controls the spice controls the universe.
Frank Herbert
And verily, a woman need know but one man well, in order to understand all men; whereas a man may know all women and understand not one of them.
Helen Rowland