Quotes by Journalists - Page 190

I earned a mater's degree in journalism and took the first job offered, as a sports writer. Instead of chasing my own fame, I wrote about famous athletes chasing theirs.
Mitch Albom
I was cranked to a fifth gear, and everything I did, I did on a deadline.
Mitch Albom
.. I thought about him now and then, the things he had taught me about 'being human' and 'relating to others;, but it was always in the distance, as if from another life.. .. The people who might have told me were long forgotten, their phone numbers buried in some packed-away box in the attic.
Mitch Albom
Do you think people love having jobs, Sylvia asks Peter in because they offer a condoned but false responsibility that masks, for at least eight hours a day, true responsibility?
David Bajo
Oh, God! That bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!
Jacob A. Riis
Is a PLONGEUR'S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is no luxury at all.
George Orwell
You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.
Elif Batuman
[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families--only to find that by then their families were gone.
Larissa MacFarquhar
Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.
Jack London
[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.
Tahir Shah
The truth is despite the hard work and juggling required to keep the different facets of the frantic life afloat, the "superwoman" has one marvelous compensation. Being busy and being seen to be busy lets you off the hook. Buys you a way out of all aspects of your many roles you secretly despise ... like cleaning cupboards ... or entertaining your husband's business friends. When you combine wife, mother, career and all, each role become the perfect excuse for avoiding the worst aspects of the other.
Bettina Arndt
So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.
Jack London
Imagine that you are stuck on a long train ride and must choose one of two books to read in order to pass the time: the first is a novel whose main character is an office worker who is essentially working to pay his monthly cable bill; the second is about someone who decides to travel in South America (and of course encounters various setbacks in the process), but who pushes beyond the boundaries of conventional American life. Which... book would you pick up to read? Indeed, which of the two characters would you rather be?
Mark Thompson
Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the secret of fulfillment is "to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.
Winifred Gallagher
The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.
Jeannette Walls
I often think about dogs when I think about work and retirement. There are many breeds of dog that just need to be working, and useful, or have a job of some kind, in order to be happy. Otherwise they are neurotically barking, scratching, or tearing up the sofa. A working dog needs to work. And I am a working dog.
Martha Sherrill
I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen' 'You make it sound so simple.''It is simple,' he said. 'The thing is, it's also a lot of hard work. And people don't want to put in a lot of work.
Jojo Moyes
A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.
Michael R. LeGault
Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
H.L. Mencken
A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.
Anne Taylor Fleming
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.
Malcolm Gladwell
The war against the Canadian seal hunt is more than a protest. It is a crusade to bring harmony between the natural world and humanity. All of us who oppose it are dedicated to the protection of life and the abolition of cruelty.
Paul Watson
As long as they are carnivorous and/or humanoid, the monster's form matters little. Whether it is Tyrannosaurus rex, saber toothed tiger, grizzly bear, werewolf, bogeyman, vampire, Wendigo, Rangda, Grendel, Moby-Dick, Joseph Stalin, the Devil, or any other manifestation of the Beast, all are objects of dark fascination, in large part because of their capacity to consciously, willfully destroy us. What unites these creatures--ancient or modern, real or imagined, beautiful or repulsive, animal, human, or god--is their superhuman strength, malevolent cunning, and, above all, their capricious, often vengeful appetite--for us. This, in fact, is our expectation of them; it's a kind of contract we have. In this capacity, the seemingly inexhaustible power of predators to fascinate us--to "capture attention"--fulfills a need far beyond morbid titillation. It has a practical application. Over time, these creatures or, more specifically, the dangers they represent, have found their way into our consciousness and taken up permanent residence there. In return, we have shown extraordinary loyalty to them--to the point that we re-create them over and over in every medium, through every era and culture, tuning and adapting them to suit changing times and needs. It seems they are a key ingredient in the glue that binds us to ourselves and to each other.
John Vaillant
In human life and in the history of faith, I think, love has a quality of a bedrock reality we discover— adventurers, travelers, each of us, only fitfully apprehending its potential. I take some solace in the fact that I’m not alone in this intuition that the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering notwithstanding, “at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love.” That’s how Desmond Tutu put it to me, with greater authority than mine from a life that has known extremes of human cruelty one to another.
Krista Tippett
I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject.
Albert Camus
Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. The questions that can lead us are already alive in our midst, waiting to be summoned and made real. It is a joy to name them. It is a gift to plant them in our senses, our bodies, the places we inhabit, the part of the world we can see and touch and help to heal. It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis.
Krista Tippett
I was weeping for all of history's incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind's greatest flaw...
Alex Haley
Foremost, step one could take is avoiding the cheap behaviour of compromising principles with decorated lies which assails the moral power of common sense.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The victory is not only the pathway of celebration but also to take the greater degree of responsibility for those who were victimised.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.
Clarice Lispector
We shouldn't be seeking the respect of an unjust system that will not respect us on the basis of our humanity alone.
Mychal Denzel Smith
I have understood over these last years that in order to believe in God, it is essential to have trust in humanity. There is no God without humanity. I continue not to believe, neither in God, nor in humanity.
José Eduardo Agualusa
There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.
John Connolly
These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.
Mark O'Connell
The heart upon which, the sense of humanity and the passion has died, that heart is the emptiness of a conception of love, mercy, and fairness of the principles. Indeed, such people are the terrorists, whether in uniform or not, in power or not, who work, as the army of the evil. The world is under that force.
Ehsan Sehgal
Our society has led us to believe that everybody is on the internet these days. Contrary to popular belief everyone is not on social media.
Germany Kent
They placed their lives on hold for a group of strangers and asked for nothing in return. They affirmed the basic goodness of man at a time when it was easy to doubt such humanity still existed. If the terrorists had hoped their attacks would reveal the weaknesses in western society, the events in Gander proved its strength.
Jim DeFede
Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.
Jane Jacobs
Be kind. We never know what people are going through. Give grace and mercy because one day your circumstance could change and you may need it.
Germany Kent
Ask God to use you. Ask Him to show you how you can be a blessing everywhere you go. Keep honoring Him so that others can see Him through you.
Germany Kent
The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
Arthur Koestler
Be transparent. Let's build a community that allows hard questions and honest conversations so we can stir up transformation in one another.
Germany Kent
Be nice to people... maybe it'll be unappreciated, unreciprocated, or ignored, but spread the love anyway. We rise by lifting others.
Germany Kent
Perhaps it's impolite to die so flippantly, after all she's done for me.
Richard Smyth
Whether is is a good or bad deal depends, for money does not always keep its value, unlike mankind, whose value is always the same, everything and nothing.
José Saramago
How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn't think he would have the right answer. But after today's mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.
Annalee Newitz
Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder—immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse—humanity.
Octave Mirbeau
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.
George Orwell
A human's best training is with his shadow. You have to fight with your shadow.
Manuel Rivas
People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, we cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth. Sacrifice - of nature, of the interests of others, even of our earlier selves - appears to be an inescapable part of our condition, the unavoidable price of all our achievements. A successful ritual is one that addresses both aspects of our predicament, recalling us to the shamefulness of our deeds at the same time it celebrates what the poet Frederick Turner calls "the beauty we have paid for with our shame." Without the double awareness pricked by such rituals, people are liable to find themselves either plundering the earth without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it's not surprising that most of us today bring one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature.
Michael Pollan
Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shimmering like translucent curtains drawn over the windows of heaven, the northern lights suddenly streaked across a million miles of space to burst in silent explosions. Fountains of light, pale greens, reds, and yellows, showered the stars and geysered up to the center of the sky, where they pooled to form a multicolored sphere, a kind of mock sun that gave light but no heat, pulsing, flaring, and casting beams in all directions, horizon to horizon. Below, the wolves howled with midnight madness and the two young men stood in speechless awe. Even after the spectacle ended, the Aurora fading again to faint shimmer, they stood as silent and transfixed as the first human beings ever to behold the wonder of creation. Starkmann felt the diminishment that is not self-depreciation but humility; for what was he and what was Bonnie George? Flickers of consciousness imprisoned in lumps of dust; above them a sky ablaze with the Aurora, around them a wilderness where wolves sang savage arias to a frozen moon.
Philip Caputo
Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.
Anthony Hiss
They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
George Orwell
Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-- they cannot work and their civilization collapses
Frank Herbert
I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents?
Joshua Foer
People who wouldn't dream of drowning a puppy in a barrel full of water think nothing of killing a fish the same slow way.
Karen Traviss
There is a graceless human tendency to wish upon others the ills visited upon oneself. Instead of pointing successors towards short cuts, you relish seeing them clambering through identical hoops.
Michela Wrong
[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.
Malcolm Muggeridge
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.
George Orwell
Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts' cage a world habitable for men.
Frank Harris