Quotes by Journalists - Page 168

...it is impossible to reason people out of affiliations they have not been reasoned into.
George Will
The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.
Malcolm Gladwell
Historically, psychologists have looked at introversion as the absence of extroversion. They measure extroversion, and if you are low in it, then you are considered an introvert. This perpetuates the perception of introversion as negative space, and introverted activities as not really doing anything. We need to train ourselves, and others, out of this idea. We need to start seeing doing nothing (or reading, or working alone on projects, or whatever it is we do to recharge) as activities that are as valid as any social event.
Sophia Dembling
I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.
Jon Ronson
One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.
Ashlee Vance
I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present
Krista Tippett
But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctions away. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them away, but your wish has no efficacy unless you grasp what it involves. The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions –notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful–are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.
George Orwell
But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctionsaway. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them away, but your wish has noefficacy unless you grasp what it involves. The fact that has got to be faced isthat to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here amI, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want toget rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result ofclass-distinctions. All my notions –notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant,of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful–are essentially middle-classnotions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my tablemanners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements ofmy body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special nicheabout half-way up the social hierarchy.
George Orwell
Truth is a matter of PerspectiveThere will be my truth and your truth and as Universal truth doesn't exist.
George Orwell
It is only when you meet someoneof a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your ownbeliefs really are.
George Orwell
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.
George Orwell
I don't have to say so because people can see it from leagues away. I am ugly, shy and anachronistic, but by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite.
Gabriel García Márquez
Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I'm not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They're always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you're like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it's really limited.
Elif Batuman
As I'd seen over and again, people who see themselves as victims sometimes don't notice when they become oppressors.
Souad Mekhennet
The Elsinore's bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a foaming valley. Not a man had gained his feet. Bridge and men swept back toward me and fetched up against the mizzen-shrouds. And then that prodigious, incredible old man appeared out of the water, on his two legs, upright, dragging with him, a man in each hand, the helpless forms of Nancy and the Faun. My heart leapt at beholding this mighty figure of a man-killer and slave-driver, it is true, but who sprang first into the teeth of danger so that his slaves might follow, and who emerged with a half-drowned slave in either hand.I knew augustness and pride as I gazed--pride that my eyes were blue, like his; that my skin was blond, like his; that my place was aft with him, and with the Samurai, in the high place of government and command. I nearly wept with the chill of pride that was akin to awe and that tingled and bristled along my spinal column and in my brain. As for the rest--the weaklings and the rejected, and the dark-pigmented things, the half-castes, the mongrel-bloods, and the dregs of long-conquered races--how could they count? My heels were iron as I gazed on them in their peril and weakness. Lord! Lord! For ten thousand generations and centuries we had stamped upon their faces and enslaved them to the toil of our will.
Jack London
Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.
Christopher Hitchens
Shall we go?' he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.
Jon Ronson
There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.
Christopher Hitchens
How do you know if your inner voice or sense of guidance is your deeper-self speaking its wisdom, your unconscious childhood programming, or the voice of your Aunt Matilda? Discerning the difference between an automatic response stemming from family beliefs, childhood distortions, or culture, and guidance from our connection with our higher/deeper self, makes life, success, and relationships so much easier.
Jennifer Howard
A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. (The subjects were well compensated, at least by undergraduate standards.)
Jonah Lehrer
sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
Jon Ronson
The world is full of terrible suffering, compared to which the small inconveniences of my childhood are as a drop of rain in the sea.
Richard Rhodes
If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealustic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time, you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.
David McRaney
At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.
Jon Ronson
If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.
David Brooks
Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid.
Jon Ronson
t tMonsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.
Andrew Sullivan
How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.
Matt Ridley
Don’t put people, or anything else, on pedestals, not even your children. Avoid global labels such as genius or weirdo. Realize those closest get the benefit of the doubt and so do the most beautiful and radiant among us. Know the halo effect causes you to see a nice person as temporarily angry and an angry person as temporarily nice. Know that one good quality, or a memory of several, can keep in your life people who may be doing you more harm than good. Pay attention to the fact that when someone seems nice and upbeat, the words coming out of his or her mouth will change in meaning, and if that same person were depressive, arrogant, or foul in some other way, your perceptions of those same exact words would change along with the person’s other features.
David McRaney
The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.
Jon Ronson
How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.
Jonah Lehrer
Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.
David McRaney
Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.
Ian Fleming
Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?
Natalie Angier
One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.
Joan Smith
we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.
Edward Humes
Some of the epidemic may overwhelm society as a physical expression of energy hysteria.
Lynne McTaggart
In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy . It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.
George Orwell
That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound.It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us.Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkably assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now posses. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith.Why? The truth is plain:We were not born to be niggers.
David Simon
The thing I got to thinking about,' he said, 'is--what are the conditions that lead to larger portions of society being generous, humble, and selfless? While we have the conditions for economic opportunity here--and that is a blessing--do we have the conditions to learn how to self-regulate our own passions for the good of the whole?
Warren St. John
I refuse to hold the coats of this generation.
Rebecca McKinsey
At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.
C.L.R. James
Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.
Anna Quindlen
Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
...wherever there is society, there is authority and the temptation to disobedience because our individual wills refuse to submit...
John Geddes
To Jurgis the packers had been the equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people. Chapter 29, pg. 376
Upton Sinclair
Osman and Prideep had been in my employment for some weeks. Every Friday I would take the to lunch. It was the high point of their calender. During the meal I would harangue them as a reminder of what they had been hired for: but my orations never seemed to increase their output. I realised later that, in the East, a commitment to produce does not automatically accompany employment.
Tahir Shah
What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.
George Orwell
It is perhaps because of the Iranian concept of the home and garden (and not the city or town it is in) as the defining center of life that Iranians find living in a society with such stringent rules of public behavior somewhat tolerable. Iranian society by and large cares very little about what goes on in the homes and gardens of private citizens, but the Islamic government cares very much how its citizens behave once they venture outside their walls.
Hooman Majd
Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
Chuck Klosterman
We are in a mutually dependent society, called civilization, and government is the oil that keeps it running and the lifeblood that carries oxygen to the various parts of the civic body.
Jack Lessenberry
In fact, the teenager's concept of "square" (f the term is still in use), when they talk about their parents, is almost identical to the concept of "cultural deprivation" as it is used by educational bureaucrats. In both cases it reflects an extremely self-centered and rigid way of looking at the world. Fortunately, with teenagers, it's a phase they grow out of.
William Ryan
Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.
David Brooks
The main difference is that the enlightened believe that the poor criminal should be rehabilitated while the righteous believe that the immoral criminal should be locked up in jail. Since almost the only available system of rehabilitation in America is to be locked up in jail, the difference remains highly abstract.
William Ryan
People are fascinating. Especially the ones who hate me.
Rebecca McKinsey
I'd been at the mercy of a prick on a power trip, the kind of buttoned-up bantam rooster who gets off on control and then, when you resist him, tells you that you've got issues with control.
Norah Vincent
Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man.
Kang Chol-Hwan
History is reticent about women who were common soldiers, who bore arms, belonged to regiments, and took part in battles on the same terms as men, though hardly a war has been waged without women soldiers in the ranks.
Stieg Larsson
As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn’t own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don’t own a TV simply means you’re poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.
Chuck Klosterman