Quotes by Journalists - Page 25

David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.
David Halberstam
Even I realized that money was to politicians what the eucalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter, and something to crap on.
P.J. O'Rourke
The politicians looked after the mandarins. The mandarins looked after the central bankers and the regulators. (The governor of the Central Bank was paid more in 2008 than the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, as was the chief executive of the Financial Regulator.) The Central Bankers looked after the bankers. The bankers looked after IBEC. And IBEC looked after the government. The circle of oligarchs was watertight.
Shane Ross
I can stomach just about anything… After all, I can deal with politicians… I don’t have any problem not puking on them! —Debra Wright, KNUT Reporter
Ray Palla
Our leaders know we’re turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what’s happened.
Matt Taibbi
Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce
One—about cigarettes—I was pleased to see that anticigarette ad on the back issue of Hustler. I'm more offended by seeing ads for cigarettes in magazines than pictures of vaginas, because one kills and the other gives life—and I think that's an important difference.
Paul Krassner
wash off the journey
Okey Ndibe
Prohibition is to abstain from intoxicating liquor, as it makes us morbid and sometimes drunk. But we get drunk every day, nevertheless, not so much by the strength of what we sip from the cup, but that which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we inhale, which at fermentation conspire at eventide to make us so drunk and tired that we lose control of ourselves and fall asleep. Everybody is a drunkard, and if we were to enforce real prohibition we should all be dead.
Marcus Garvey
Fuck you, diet,” said Stuart. “The diet schmeer is the end of civilisation as we know it.
David Pratt
Successful women don't sleep until noon.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Always present yourself as a woman who expects to succeed.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Elizabeth was counting on Marco to keep cousin Mary occupied until after the board meeting was over. A piece of cheese might catch a mouse, but an afternoon alone with a muscular masseur would ensnare her cousin far more effectively. And afterwards, while Mary lay sated and sleeping upon a massage table, wiser heads could determine the company's future. There were times, Elizabeth thought, when success in business demanded utter ruthlessness.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
You must question everything. You have to always ask why, and if you do not understand the answer, you ask again.
Gemma Malley
All my life, I ain't understand shit about what was going on. A thing just happen, then something else happen, then something else, an so on, and half the time nothing making any sense. But Dan say it is all part of a scheme of some sort, and the best way we can get along is figure out how we fit into the scheme, and then try to stick to our place. Somehow knowing this, things get a good bit clearer for me.
Winston Groom
The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain.
Ernest Hemingway
There is something inside all boys that drives us to go away again and again and again.
Andrew Smith
It was not very long afterwards that Michael woke up one morning with a curious feeling inside him. He knew, the moment he opened his eyes, that something was wrong but he was not quite sure what it was. "What is today, Mary Poppins?" He enquired, pushing the bedclothes away from him. "Tuesday," said Mary Poppins. "Go and turn on your bath. Hurry!" she said, as he made no effort to move. He turned over and pulled the bedclothes up over his head and the curious feeling increased. "What did I say?" said Mary Poppins in that cold, clear voice that was always a Warning. Michael knew now what was happening to him. He knew he was going to be naughty.
P.L. Travers
What is it with boys? How do they slide into fucked-upness so quickly, with such natural ease?
Aleksandar Hemon
She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.
Omar El Akkad
All her life she'd had little interest in the workings of boys' minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things.
Omar El Akkad
His [Luke]letter went something like this: "Dear Mr President, Thank you for introducing me to the Hall of Famers and for showing me the Oval Office. I think if I work really hard I will have a chance for both."The next time I saw the president I told him about my son's ambitious plans. His response was beautiful: "Never get between a boy and his dreams
Tim Russert
Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they're going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you'd smell from a bottle of Tide.
Allison Winn Scotch
...the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.
Sarah Vowell
Halloween creatures both friendly & gruesome peered out of the rustling leaves.
Kevin Purdy
Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.
Hal Borland
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orc
Walt Whitman
Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.
Jim Bishop
With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.
Ernest Hemingway
Privilege" is something else."Privilege" is a judgment."Privilege" is an opinion."Privilege" is an accusation.
Joan Didion
Be yourself!’ said Gro. ‘No one will hear any of you otherwise, still less trust you. That’s the most important thing of all. If you’re not yourself you just can’t sustain it in the long term.
Åsne Seierstad
Do not let other people invade your personality. Remember that every human being is a unique phenomenon, and worth developing. You will meet many who have no resources of their own, and who will try to fasten themselves upon you. You will find others eager to tell you what to do and think and be. But it is better to go apart and learn to be yourself.
Upton Sinclair
Everyone's on the cliff edge of normal. Everyone finds life an utter nightmare sometimes, and there's no 'normal' way of dealing with it... There is no normal, Evelyn.
Holly Bourne
In my early teens, [my grandfather] would sometimes stomp around his living room, where he used to shave towards mid-day with bowl, brush and open razor, deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. 'What is sociology?' he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right.
Peter Hitchens
I set free the phantoms of my imagination.
Frigyes Karinthy
Is it possible that power can conquer matter, that the soul makes a mightier truth than the body, that life has a meaning that survives life itself, that good survives evil as life survives death, that God, after all, is more powerful than the Devil?
Frigyes Karinthy
Everything returns and renews itself. The difference now is that the rate of these returns has increased, in both space and time, in an unheard-of fashion. Now my thoughts can circle the globe in minutes. Entire passages of world history are played out in a couple of years.
Frigyes Karinthy
Now we live in fairyland. The only lightly disappointing thing about this land is that it is smaller than the real world has ever been.
Frigyes Karinthy
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
Jane Jacobs
If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.
Robert Wright
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Malcolm Gladwell
I wasn't in danger today," I tell him in a choked voice. "I escaped danger today." And I did... I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn't even known I was in. "I escaped," I repeat.
Gayle Forman
A mountain had died, its skeleton had been scattered over the ground. Time had aged the mountain; time had killed the mountain-and here lay the mountain's bones.
Vasily Grossman
You don't need to know what you're escaping from to become a fugitive.
Bella Pollen
The backside of mountain is a fight against human nature," he said. "You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.
Mitch Albom
There is a fearful moment of reckoning before us should it ever chance that when all our trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar of the patron-fiend of news, the newspaper supply shall suddenly be cut off and we find ourselves some fine morning minus our tidbits of shame and failure and disaster, left to the companionship of our own thoughts. Dante never imagined a terror like this.
Adeline Knapp
If the day comes when our descendants can venture with wonder into chestnut forests, we will have gained back more than a perfect tree. We will have gained a new reason for hope.
Susan Freinkel
The coast redwood is the tallest species of tree on earth. The tallest redwoods today are between 350 and close to 380 feet in height--thirty-five to thirty-eight stories tall. The crown of a tree is its radiant array of limbs and branches, covered with leaves. The crowns of the tallest redwoods can sometimes look like the plume of exhaust from a rocket taking off.
Richard Preston
... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.
Richard Preston
The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in a ruined world ...
Richard Preston
The coast redwood is a so-called relict species. It is a tiny remnant of a life form that once spread in splendor and power across the face of nature. The redwood has settled down in California to live near the sea, the way many retired people do.
Richard Preston
A strong wind was blowing and it felt really very cold and seemed so unfamiliar and bizarre. But the trees remembered me. They bowed gently in the breeze…and called me nearer, welcoming me.
Debalina Haldar
Planting trees, I myself thought for a long time, was a feel-good thing, a nice but feeble response to our litany of modern-day environmental problems. In the last few years, though, as I have read many dozens of articles and books and interviewed scientists here and abroad, my thinking on the issue has changed. Planting trees may be the single most important ecotechnology that we have to put the broken pieces of our planet back together.
Jim Robbins
Trees are obviously a lot less mobile than, say, trogons—tropical birds common in Manú—or even ticks. But in a cloud forest, trees structure the ecosystem, much as corals structure a reef. Certain types of insects depend on certain types of trees, and certain sorts if birds depend on those insects, and so on up the food chain. The reverse is also true: animals are critical to the survival of the forest. They are the pollinators and seed dispersers, and the birds prevent the insects from taking over. At the very least . . . global warming will restructure ecological communities. Different groups if trees will respond differently to warming, and so contemporary associations will break down. New ones will form. In this planet-wide restructuring, some species will thrive. . . . Others will fall behind and eventually drop out.
Elizabeth Kolbert
The road simply ended. No cul-de-sac. No sign like the ones they had seen before: "Private Property. No Trespassing." Or "No Motorized Vehicles Beyond This Point." Just road...then trees.
Robert Liparulo
[S]he realized quite abruptly that this thing which took him off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that was against her own little will and instincts—was enormous as the sea. It was no mere prettiness of single Trees, but something massed and mountainous. About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky, its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious. What she knew of it hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds was but, as it were the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away. The trees, indeed, were sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing kettle. Out yonder—in the Forest further out—the thing that was ever roaring at the center was dreadfully increasing.
Algernon Blackwood
The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” (pp.281-82)
Sarah Turnbull
The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.
George Orwell
Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929
John Vaillant
A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.
Jessica Mitford