Quotes by Journalists - Page 24

Sexual rights are not only a basic element of human rights but should have an integral part in moves towards Arab reform ...
Brian Whitaker
Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something you had a right to.
George Orwell
Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx.
Adam Hochschild
Americans care more about the rights of animals than about what happens to us!
Joe Sacco
You can't have occupation and human rights.
Christopher Hitchens
At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argen
Christopher Hitchens
I just want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress
Jojo Moyes
There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
Albert Camus
change.
Mara Schiavocampo
Trying to change someone only makes them cling to their existing behavior with brutish, primal force.
Brian D'Ambrosio
Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56
Ian Sansom
All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.
Avi Steinberg
Moving a pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other requires strength. Time, discipline, patience.
Sarah Hepola
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.
Caitlin Moran
When life seems not worth living, ten minutes in a library proves otherwise.
Miv Schaaf
People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries....But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them.
Justine Picardie
I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.
Marilyn Johnson
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one — at least, no male person — ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker’s Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like —— and ——.
George Orwell
Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.
John McPhee
But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would.
Laura Lippman
Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.
Marilyn Johnson
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.
Norman Cousins
I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.
Scott Douglas
In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim.
Linton Weeks
A world in which people with learning difficulties have access to the resources they need to live happier, healthier, more secure and more meaningful lives.
Steve Silberman
Damn it! I knew she was a monster! John! Amy! Listen! Guard your buttholes.
David Wong
Wise Child: Why don't you beat me then?Juniper: I can't be bothered.
Monica Furlong
...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...
John Geddes
Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abru
Colm Tóibín
I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.
Will Self
Ninth Floorshe ran across the parquet slipped the flokati matcrashed the windownoshe stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise nightspread hernoshe tilted dived swanning spinningtip-toed ink air broke fingers firstnoshe climbed the small gap the window gavehung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breathfell ligament torn and sorrynoshe wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputteringleaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jacknothis is how it was:drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with griefroared the ungiving window frames which gaveshe spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voicedstreet lights crashed on herno.She did nothing.
Karin Schimke
Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly.
Émile Zola
You have left too much of yourself in this land for it not to be yours. I, too, will always be yours, for you have left too much of yourself with me for it to be otherwise.
Nicholas Proffitt
In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
In your heart of hearts, I believe all of you around this table know what this country needs.
Timur Vermes
Events went on to show that it is not by chance that a prime minister reaches such lofty heights and that, as the infallible wisdom of nations has demonstrated time and time again, each country gets the government it deserves, although it must be said that while it is true to say that prime ministers, for good or ill, are not all the same, it is no less true to say, are all countries.
José Saramago
We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve's last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values-the whole Pandora's box of immaturity-were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in the later years.
Brent Schlender
Regardless of your religious beliefs, you should never tell a mourning mother that it was "God's plan." For some people, that can be worse than saying nothing at all. For a non-believer, the words that are meant to console a religious person can do quite the opposite.
David G. McAfee
Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.
Christopher Hitchens
This is why we all fight so hard. Not just for the vote, but for an equal opportunity in the world. A vote is a voice. I think you underestimate yourself, Queenie. This is your fight, same as it is mine.
Sharon Biggs Waller
I used to try to be cool. I said things that I didn't believe about other people, and celebrities, and myself; I wrote mean jokes for cheap, "edgy" laughs; I neglected good friendships for shallow one; I insisted I wasn't a feminist; I nodded along with casual misogyny in hopes that shitty dudes would like me.
Lindy West
We are becoming the men we wanted to marry
Gloria Steinem
Her remark laid bare not only the reality - not enough comic opportunities for women in Hollywood - but also the ideology that created and perpetuated that reality. It was right there in the sentence structure, easily parsed: 'All the scripts are for men and you play 'the girl'' suggests that the scripts were handed down by the clean, white hand of God. It banished 'the girl' to the sidelines to perform her girly insignificance on command. It was right there in the dismissive way her comment was received as clickbait all over the Internet. 'Borat's Babe Plans a Hollywood Sex Revolution,' one headline announced, not only missing the point but mocking and dismissing it. Women's experience in its entirety seemed contained in that remark, not to mention several of the stages of feminist grief: the shock of waking up to the fact that the world does not also belong to you; the shame at having been so naive as to have thought it did; the indignation, depression, and despair that follow this realization; and, finally, the marshaling of the handy coping mechanisms, compartmentalization, pragmatism, and diminished expectations.
Carina Chocano
Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.
José Saramago
Fear is the possibility of freedom.
Peter Stamm
Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).
Christopher Hitchens
one wonders how much real conversation there is when one party does not, in many districts, have to contend for the votes of minorities, and the other can only elevate minorities into positions of power when the political wind is blowing in its direction.
Garrance Franke-Ruta
Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.
Ved Mehta
They were going to have a conversation, he realized. Archie didn't know a lot about women, but he had been married and he knew when a conversation was coming, and he knew when a woman wanted to have one, the best thing you could do was get it over with.
Chelsea Cain
Jack Kennedy brought an "intense concentration" and a "gently teasing humor" to the dinner table, along with what Katherine Graham called his habit of "vacuum cleaning your brain.
Sally Bedell Smith
At some point in my early forties I realized that my primary goal in just about any verbal exchange is to lighten the mood.
Meghan Daum
Manners are the ability to put someone else at their ease...by turning any answer into another question.
Tina Brown
But with superior morale, with an unwavering, fanatical spirit, everything is possible!
Timur Vermes
Sexual abuse of children now presents society with the ultimate crisis of patriarchy, when children refuse to protect their fathers by keeping secrets.
Beatrix Campbell
Women must show their public face. We must help to work out our own community problems. We must insist on having equal voices and equal responsibilities. . . In large part, success depends on changing minds at home, in the streets, and at the workplace - not just in legislatures and in the courts. Each and every one of us has and important role to play in completing that task.
Joan Biskupic
In their quest for power and self-importance, to compensate for whatever feelings of social inadequacy or sexual insecurity, they (Politicians)are prepared to perpetrate something which is hard to distinguish from mass murder if they think they can get away with it...
Auberon Waugh
Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.
George Packer
...we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact.
Walter Lippmann