Quotes by Journalists - Page 34

Our heroes are over there where the white crosses are. We're survivors over here. None of us are heroes. I don't think you'll talk to a man who say we are. You figure a hero is someone who does above and beyond the call of duty, and when you give your life that's as above and beyond as you can get- Earl McClung.
Marcus Brotherton
We're our own heroes.
Gwenda Bond
Maybe the wild ones weren't hyperactive; maybe they were misplaced heroes. After all, in another era, the same behavior that is now throttled with Ritalin and disciplinary rap sheets would have been the mark of greatness, the early blooming of a true champion. Riordan played with the idea, imagining the what-ifs. What if strong, assertive children were redirected rather than discouraged? What if there were a place for them, an outdoor training camp that felt like a playground, where they could cut loose with all those natural instincts to run, wrestle, climb, swim, and explore?
Christopher McDougall
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
Ernest Hemingway
Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
Lev Grossman
When the author admits to Christians that he was not a Christian himself, he says their dialogue became "distant and rehearsed, like a pitch for Ginsu knives.
Kevin Roose
I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon
David Carr
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
Albert Camus
Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. 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. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
George Orwell
[Nicholson] Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open letter he wrote to the British people on 3 July 1940. "Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans," wrote the Mahatma. "I want you to fight Nazism without arms." He went on to say: "Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." I must say that everything in me declines to be addressed in that tone of voice
Christopher Hitchens
I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.
Chuck Klosterman
The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.
Christopher Hitchens
Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.
Jeannette Walls
I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the centre of a gigantic global debate on this subject?
Caitlin Moran
After all, you can argue – argue until you cry – about whatmodern, codified misogyny is; but straight-up ungentlemanliness,of the kind his mother would clatter the back of his head for, isinarguable. It doesn’t need to be a ‘man vs woman’ thing. It’s just atiff between The Guys.Seeing the whole world as ‘The Guys’ is important. The ideathat we’re all, at the end of the day, just a bunch of well-meaningschlumps, trying to get along, is the basic alpha and omega of myworld view. I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘antimen’. I’m just ‘Thumbsup for the six billion’.
Caitlin Moran
There were elements of Mad Men at Newsweek, except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in...Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the Newsweek of the early 1960s as similar to an old movie, with the wisecracking private eye and his Girl Friday. "The 'hubba-hubba' climate was tolerated," he recalled. "I was told the editors would ask the girls to do handstands on their desk. Was there rancor? Yes. But in this climate, a laugh would follow.
Lynn Povich
...at Newsweek only girls with college degrees--and we were called "girls" then--were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to "clippers," another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn't smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out releveant articles with razor-edged "rip sticks," and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. "Being a clipper was a horrible job," said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, "and to make matters worse, I was good at it.
Lynn Povich
It is my sincere opinion that our precious time on earth should not be spent attempting to justify unbelievable acts of cruelty, death, and disease as a part of 'God’s Plan' or the greater good — and clinging to ancient texts that preach ill-concealed bigotry and sexism. Instead, we should find ways to make this life happy and satisfying, without regard to the unknowable nature of an afterlife.
David G. McAfee
...they were no more than steaks served up to portly politicians who controlled the personnel departments of the TV stations. (Showgirls in Italy)
Tobias Jones
Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!
Gloria Steinem
In three weeks, the women's team had done more for soccer in the United States than any team had ever done. Yet, the United States Soccer Federation was unprepared and unwelcoming in its acerbic response to the women's success. With petty, resentful, chauvinistic behavior, the federation would bungle what should have been its greatest moment as a national governing body. Its leaders would criticize DiCicco instead of congratulating him, they would threaten to sue the women over an indoor victory tour and they would wait an unacceptably long period before entering into contract negotiations with the team. Then, at the end of the year, the federation would offer a deal that the women found insulting. Unwilling to trust that the federation was bargaining in good faith, the women would boycott a trip to a tournament in Australia. They would become champions of the world, embraced by the president, by the largest crowd ever to watch women play and by the largest television audience for soccer in this country, embraced by everyone, it seemed, but the officials who ran the sport with the vision of a student council. Increasingly, it appeared, the only amateurs left in sports were the people running the federations that governed them.
Jere Longman
In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it's not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughter's genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination.
Nicholas D. Kristof
In short, women themselves absorb and transmit misogynistic values, just as men do. This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
i think one has to even abandon the phrase "ally" and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The "feminine" woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.
Susan Faludi
Femininity is wearing shoes that make it difficult to run, skirts that inhibit movement, and underclothes that interfere with blood circulation. It can hardly be coincidental that the clothes men find most flattering on a woman are precisely those that make it most difficult for her to defend herself against aggression.
Suzanne Brøgger
She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself?
Émile Zola
...the strands that connect us are frail, so don't hang great weights on slender wires...
John Geddes
Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey water that peeled across our bow. The pellets of rain were warm and Benjamin and I caught them on our tongues as our grandmother laughed behind us. Our canoes skimmed along and as I watched the shoreline it seemed the land itself was in motion. The rocks lay lodged like hymns in the breast of it, and the trees bent upward in praise like crooked fingers. It was glorious. Ben felt it too. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I held his look a long time, drinking in the face of my brother.
Richard Wagamese
Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.
Ernest Hemingway
I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.
Barbara Ehrenreich
You will face yourself again in a moment of terror and will learn once again that old lesson you keep forgetting: that you can escape from anywhere, but you cannot flee your own self.
Mihail Sebastian
The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.
Max Hastings
Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.
Tahir Shah
So you've stopped thinking you're going to die?Oh, I'm more certain of it than ever. But I've stopped being scared.
Carsten Jensen
Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.
Manel Loureiro
My balls shrank in terror. I was convinced we were going to die.
Manel Loureiro
The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene
Matt Ridley
Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.
Paul Watson
TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.
Matt Ridley
The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.
Michael Pollan
In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.
Anna Quindlen
The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.
Renata Adler
[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors!
Tom Wolfe
Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!
Walt Whitman
Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.
H.L. Mencken
If you think you’ll find intellectual stimulation, you’re thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I’ve never been more bored by casual chat.
Andrew Sullivan
The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.
Mark Helprin
You might find me cleverly clad, in black on black, at 28th and 7th Ave.
Jonathan P. Lamas
Did you go to the the theatre last time you were here?'No, it's too expensive.''What did you do?''What tourists always do in New York City. Empire State, Statue of and all the galleries. There's a million galleries.''Where'd you stay?''The first two nights, I slept in an abandoned car. A Pontiac Grand Am.' Weren't you scared?''Not really. It had a doorman.
Sean Condon
There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscraper. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will just glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.
John dos Passos
Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.
Stephanie Clifford
I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
Joan Didion
... I somehow got the idea that oak floors were located exclusively in New York City. This came chiefly from watching Woody Allen movies. I wanted to live someplace that looked like Mia Farrow's apartment in 'Hannah and Her Sisters' (little did I know that it was Mia Farrow's apartment). To me, this kind of space did not connote wealth. These were places where paint was peeling and the rugs were frayed, places where smart people sat around drinking gin and tonics, having interesting conversations, and living, according to my logic, in an authentic way.
Meghan Daum
You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)
Robert A. Caro
And yet, there will always be something essentially elsewhere about New York. It is a place that people come to precisely because it doesn't ever fully offer itself. It's intoxicating. Keeps you on your toes. Keeps you drinking coffee and keeps you walking.
Becky Cooper
Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one's city and everyone's city.
Becky Cooper
New York is the place where everyone will stop a championship fight to look at an usher giving a drunk the bum's rush.
Damon Runyon
If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.
Sarah Vowell
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
H.L. Mencken