Quotes by Journalists - Page 150

Wal-Mart is so large, its reach so great, that it has created an ecosystem in which its suppliers and competitors, and their suppliers and competitors, and their customers, all operate. Wal-Mart sets the metabolism, it sets the rules, of that ecosystem. Wal-Mart has inexorably changed our expectations as shoppers—and the Wal-Mart effect also extends to consumers who never shop at Wal-Mart. Likewise, Wal-Mart has reshaped the companies that supply it—and it has also reset the pace and the competitive landscape even for companies that try to do business outside the Wal-Mart ecosystem.
Charles Fishman
Never underestimate the staying power of a bad idea.
RC Longworth
Going to work every day was like my hair was on fire and all I had to put it out was a hammer.
Bethany McLean
In our own lives, we will try something new and, finding that it isn't easy for us, we conclude we don't have a talent for it.
Geoff Colvin
If the iPhone gained traction, RIM’s senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM’s core business customers valued BlackBerry’s secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.
Sean Silcoff
Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.
Malcolm Gladwell
The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
Malcolm Gladwell
Every crossroad in life has four options – quit, adapt, proceed, or accept, but quitting is a dead-end.
Sharon Nir
The pitch we used to convince companies to spend $50 million bucks for one of our planes was that it wasn't simply a means of transportation; oh no - it was 'a productivity tool'. It allowed an executive to make good use of his travel time and a relaxed and refreshed executive could seal the deal much more effectively than his travel-worn counterpart. Yeah, right. You can always justify any obscene luxury on the grounds of productivity...
Joseph Finder
In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you're too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own.
Mitch Albom
CHOAM is business and business follows profits.
Frank Herbert
I never truly believed that human business was some serious thing.
Albert Camus
[My parents] always seemed less like lovebirds than like amiable business partners, for whom I'm the sole product.
Gayle Forman
You don't feel thirty percent smarter when the stock goes up by thirty percent so when the stock goes down you shouldn't feel thirty percent dumber" Jeff Bezos
Brad Stone
Being able to pick and read good waves is almost more important than surfing well.
Shane Snow
Posting dramatic charts or funny pictures is good and giving people smart reasons to believe what they already think is great.
Derek Thompson
The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.
Derek Thompson
Some consumers buy products not because they are ‘better” in any way, but simply because they are popular. What they’re buying is not just a product, but also a piece of popularity itself.
Derek Thompson
Of course, clothes don't make the man, but they make all of him except his hands and face during business hours, and that's a pretty considerable area of the human animal. A dirty shirt may hide a pure heart, but it seldom covers a clean skin. If you look as if you had slept in our clothes, most men will jump to the conclusion that you have, and you will never get to know them well enough to explain that your head is so full of noble thoughts that you haven't time to bother with the dandruff on your shoulders...Appearances are deceitful, I know, but so long as they are, there's nothing like having them deceive for us instead of against us.
George Horace Lorimer
He who gives back at first repulse and without striking the second blow, despairs success, has never been, is not, and never will be, a hero in love, war or business. - Frederick Tudor
Gavin Weightman
Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.
Cory Doctorow
Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I've made a big investment in you, Peter. Time and money, and it's not working. Now, I could just shake my head and smile. But in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar.
Tom Wolfe
We had all opted to take City's financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in their twenties, and broke, goes into journalism to write about money—a subject in which they still have zero practical experience.
Chris Ayres
Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street -- a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American.
Roger Lowenstein
Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.
Cory Doctorow
We designed Google to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free.- Urs Hölzle
Steven Levy
What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
Frank Herbert
My point is that this Potter business has legs. It will run and run, and we must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention. I appeal to the children of this country and to their Potter-fiend parents to write to Warner Bros and Universal, and perhaps, even, to the great J K herself. Bring Harry home to Britain—and if you want a site with less rainfall than Rome, with excellent public transport, and strong connections to Harry Potter, I have just the place.
Boris Johnson
There’s not a chance we’ll reach our full potential until we stop blaming each other and start practicing personal accountability.
John Miller
We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.
Fareed Zakaria
Results for "A man is like a cat; chase him and he'll run; sit still and ignore him and he'll come purring at your feet
Helen Rowland
A woman's flattery may inflate a man's head a little; but her criticism goes straight to his heart, and contracts it so that it can never again hold quite as much love for her.
Helen Rowland
Men do things. We can't help it. That's all there is to it. As you will discover in time, the primary choice every man has to make is whether he wants to be himself or if he wants peace.
Manu Joseph
In his experience with women, it was difficult to recover once things began to go wrong--once they had unreasonably decided that you were a person with whom they were not under any circumstances ever going to have sex.
John Lanchester
Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.
Nick Tosches
One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behavior was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people's experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women.
Rosalind Coward
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons.
Albert Camus
Please don't grow up to be one of those men who lie for the sport of it, and most men do. That's a fact. That's why the world is so messed up, Noah. That's why history books are full of so much heartache, and tragedy. Politicians, dictators, kings, phoney-baloney preachers-most of 'em are men, and most of 'em lie like rugs
Carl Hiaasen
Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother's pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function was to marry and to pay.
Émile Zola
I gave my heart to a man who loved me, who wanted to be with me. Who ultimately was afraid of all I offered.I didn’t understand why he sabotaged our future at the time – cheating on me, again, as we were making final plans to move in together. By the time he came over to smooth talk his way out of it, I was done. No more crying. Even my tears had given up on him. I’d already moved on, his cheating was simply the key left in the mailbox.
Rachel Thompson
He had made a fairly unambiguous pass at her, as she was getting out of the cab. But event that had come to nothing. Sheba said that she had sensed something resentful about him, as if he begrudged her for having the power to attract him.
Zoë Heller
I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.
Albert Camus
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The marks of that so-called intuition are simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, a habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, a magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.
H.L. Mencken
Men demand much more than you think," she would tell her enigmatically. "There's a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.
Gabriel García Márquez
Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.
Lev Grossman
The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
Rebecca West
What was it with gay men and art photos of nude male torsos?
David Pratt
In the street below, a posh-looking drunk man is reading the card of a prostitute, Blue-Tacked up by a doorbell. He’s examining it with all the forensic care I presume he puts into reading a wine list.‘What are you looking for?’ I ask him, in my head. ‘What woman will go best with your main course of terrible, horny loneliness?’I speculate, briefly, on how different the world would be if it were run by women. In that world, if you were a lonely, horny woman – as I am. As I always am – you’d see Blu-tacked postcards by Soho doorways that read, ‘Nice man in cardigan, 24, will talk to you about The Smiths whilst making you cheese-on-toast + come to parties with you. Apply within.
Caitlin Moran
History chews up sexually uncertain boys, and spits us out as recycled, generic greeting cards for lonely old men.
Andrew Smith
Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one’s view of them.
John Connolly
But too often men react to women in positions of power with misogyny, often in sexualized terms. I have heard men in such situations talk about how "I'd like to fuck that bitch and teach her a lesson," for example. That kind of reaction demonstrates that no matter what the class position of a man and woman, men can use the weapon of sexualized violence to attempt to assert their dominance.
Robert Jensen
Men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable.
Jacques Yonnet
Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.
John dos Passos
They say that a man is as faithful as his options, and in this moment I know it to be true. So I switched the phone off. It's too much. Even Jesus only had three temptations.
Neil Strauss
Our society seems to say that a real man needs and wants nobody.
Stuart Miller
After all, what is ''a man'' nowadays? Somebody who stands alone, independent of all ties.
Stuart Miller
Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that "Quiet City" made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasure: the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art - Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise - yourself a strong defense. There were times you were worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in a t a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How luck we are, when we've spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!
Lionel Shriver
He felt Miss Kristina's presence like something poisonous and something infinitely sweet mixing together in his blood. Inside him, a lack of willpower and a colossal tension battled it out. He felt both weak and furious at the same time. He went around with his fists clenched, ready to fight, yet what he wanted most of all was to hold and be held.
Carsten Jensen
He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs for one another.
Albert Camus
If you’re the dad of a daughter, your job is particularly important, affecting her self-esteem, her autonomy, and her aspirations (according to one study, out of the University of British Columbia, daughters who see their dads doing chores are less likely to limit theircareer aspirations to stereotypically female industries, like teaching or nursing). But you can’t just talk the talk, you have to actually walk it. We promise, it’ll pay off for you, too! Working dads who spend more time with their kids are happier in their jobs. They’re also more patient, empathetic, and flexible—and at least one study claims it might just help them live longer.
Jessica Bennett