Quotes by Journalists - Page 202

You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.
Ambrose Bierce
We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
Gloria Steinem
I've often observed that women can be the weakest link in women's rights.
Jean Sasson
How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.
Albert Camus
Never let stress shape your strategy. Most women think better after a brisk walk, a light meal, a massage and a nap.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.
F. Sionil Jose'
I try to make my comments like a woman's skirt: long enough to be respectable and short enough to be interesting.
Adam Clayton Powell III
Lines don’t make beautiful women less beautiful
Isabel Wolff
After all, a woman didn't leave much behind in the world to show she'd been there. Even the children she bore and raised got their father's name. But her quilts, now that was something she could pass on.
Sandra Dallas
Powerful women always interpret hostility as unrequited love.
Tina Brown
Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object, the difference is that is not all she longs to be.
Betty Rollin
When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?
Chuck Klosterman
When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.
Nicholas D. Kristof
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
Norman Mailer
On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.
H.L. Mencken
These days, however, I am much calmer - since I realised that it’s technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn’t be allowed to have a debate on women’s place in society. You’d be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor - biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men’s card game - before going back to quick-liming the dunny. This is why those female columnists in the Daily Mail - giving daily wail against feminism - amuse me. They paid you £1,600 for that, dear, I think. And I bet it’s going in your bank account, and not your husband’s. The more women argue loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges.
Caitlin Moran
Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
Barbara Ehrenreich
When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.
Caitlin Moran
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
Gloria Steinem
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.
Gloria Steinem
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.
Rebecca West
Yes, we praise women over 40 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it's not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed, hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year old waitress. Ladies, I apologize. For all those men who say, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?", here's an update for you. Nowadays 80% of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it's not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage!
Andy Rooney
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
Gloria Steinem
But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.
Gabriel García Márquez
One thing I learned in this world? Things don't last. People say they do. They don't. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don't.
Pete Hamill
Things is very primitive in the jungle - no place to shit, sleep on the ground like an animal, eat out of cans, no place to take a bath or nothing, clothes is all rotting off.
Winston Groom
Keep expecting and believing that your due season is coming. Declare that the good you have harvested in your life will manifest.
Germany Kent
and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth
George Orwell
As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside of a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government.
Rebecca Traister
If the political left weren't so joyless, humorless, intrusive, taxing, over-taxing, anarchistic, controlling, rudderless, chaos-prone, pedantic, unrealistic, hypocritical, clueless, politically correct, angry, cruel, sanctimonious, retributive, redistributive, intolerant, and if the political left wasn't hell-bent on expansion of said unpleasantness into all aspects of my family's life the truth is: I would not be in your life. If the democratic party were run by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, if it had the slightest vestige of JFK and Henry "Scoop" Jackson I wouldn't be on the political map. If the American media were run by biased but not evil Tim Russert and David Brinkley types I wouldn't have joined the fight. You would not know who I am. The left made me do it, I swear, I am a reluctant cultural warrior.
Andrew Breitbart
There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius.
Boris Johnson
Nothing can be changed in the system when the system itself is revolting against those who opposed violence.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
How can you cry for others’ struggles when you are facilitating mayhem in your own land?
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
A society is driven by “social fear” always produces the seeds of doubt and unhappiness.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The era of revolution by military means produced a greater degree of desperation and frustration. This was brought to an end by the people.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The most fundamental problem is not that we don’t have a system to run but those with knowledge are cynically manipulating the system for petty personal desires.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
When the day to day life is suppressing you, how could you put your moral values and will power to the realm of life?
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.
Chuck Klosterman
Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, “That would certainly make everything easier,” even though I can’t think of one person who’d qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson.
Chuck Klosterman
Reconciliation without truth is nothing but a smokescreen
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.
Robert Harris
In politics all abstract terms conceal treachery.
C.L.R. James
...Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them. You follow a set of rules, enshrined in a constitution or in custom, to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. Politics is a muddled activity in which people have to recognize restraints and settle for less than they want. Disappointment is normal.But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way....
David Brooks
In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.
Lionel Shriver
Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections.
Frank Herbert
In researching this book, I quickly discovered a surprising thing about the 1960s: the decade was not nearly as radical as we've been led to believe. In fact, the upheaval was really confined to a very narrow stratum of society. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the 1960s was a conservative decade.
Jonathan Leaf
Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.
Hunter S. Thompson
It is not necessary to remind you of the fact that your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other. All of these things you know.
Edward R. Murrow
....the increasingly common ideology that assures people they’re right about what they believe.... is, however, socially detrimental . It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.
Chuck Klosterman
Both Obama and Romney ended up in the wrong place: the former thought American exceptionalism was no longer true and should be given up while the latter thought it was still true. Neither was willing to tell Americans that they were no longer exceptional but should try to be again.
George Packer
Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.
Lionel Shriver
That unique Moscow mix of tackiness and menace. One time I see a poster advertising a new property development that captures the tone nicely. Got up in the style of Nazi propaganda, it shows two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan "Life is Getting Better". It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it's not quite serious either. It's sort of both. It's saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we're just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we're making money playing it and won't let anyone subvert its rules).
Peter Pomerantsev
Power is the ability to direct or privent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals.
Moisés Naím
I merely repeat, remember always your duty of enmity towards Man and all his ways. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.
George Orwell
The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master. With the worthless parasitical human beings gone, there was more for everyone to eat. There was more leisure too, inexperienced though the animals were.
George Orwell
Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama’s star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hitler was calling upon Almighty God to give him courage and strength to save the German people and right the wrongs of Versailles...and then to settle down and govern the county in the interest of those millions of oppressed "little people" for whom he spoke so eloquently.
Upton Sinclair
Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.
George Orwell
The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right.I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.
Ta-Nehisi Coates