Quotes by Journalists - Page 4

Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.
Dorothy Day
...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant...
Gary Taubes
At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.
Svetlana Alexievich
I preyed on this sort of thing, discontentment, a clash of passions among the rivals, and the zealots. Open sores opened secrets. That’s how I roll.” Jackson Guild, The Trinity Conspiracy, Betrayal at Black Mesa
Jeff Shear
The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.
Mark O'Connell
I recalled with some discomfort that the man driving the vehicle had invented the sport of volcano boarding, presumably as a way of solving, in one deft move, the problems of the insufficient riskiness of both snowboarding and hanging out on the slopes of active volcanoes. Although I was not sure that I wanted to live forever, I was sure that I didn’t want to go down in a blaze of chintzy irony, plunging into a ravine strapped into the passenger seat of a thing called the Immortality Bus.
Mark O'Connell
Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.
Walter Isaacson
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.
Murray Kempton
Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
David Halberstam
there is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolation. Add to the fact that in our competitive, perfectionist culture, in which the price woman are required to pay for freedom still seems to be martyrdom, almost everyone lies about motherhood. Part of that lying is loyalty - I can't let on that my kid is the only one on the playground who can't read or play the piano - and part of it is self-protection, since we've made hyper-motherhood a measure of female success. The preferred answer to the question "How are you?" is always "Fine," and the answer to the question "How are the kids?" is supposed to be "Great!" That's true even if the accurate answers would be "terrible" and "a mess." I think it produces its own kind of desperation, especially for women, who yearn to be emotionally open.
Anna Quindlen
Being a mother was like being trapped in the first fifteen minutes of a horror film. Everything was fine, lovely. But there was this persistent sense of dread.
Laura Lippman
I have often observed that the state of motherhood can turn quite ordinary females into heroines . . .
Kate Saunders
Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
It is one thing to rouse the passion of a people, and quite another to lead them.
Ron Suskind
Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.
Michael Lewis
Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.
David J. Morris
It was like I'd climbed Everest, had the summit in my sight, the flag in my hand, all ready to pierce it into the top of the mountain and say, "Whoopdedoo, I made it," and then an avalanche from out of nowhere swept me right back to the bottom of the mountain again. Was it worth bothering to try and climb it again? I was exhausted. I'd already climbed it. I didn't want to...but, then, what other choice was there?
Holly Bourne
The failure of the roman system to furnish decent minimal standards for the mass of people was a fundamental cause of instability, both political and economic.
H.J. Haskell
There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.
Nicholas Carr
In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss. By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance.
Gloria Steinem
Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.
Nate Silver
...You won't age? I promise you this - your hands will go shiny and transparent and at the slightest bruise they'll bleed...
John Geddes
In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.
Albert Camus
Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing – flying kicks, roaring weapons, crashing cars, flaming explosions. These are the moral equivalents of old-time cinematic sex. The fictional spurting of gun muzzles after flirtation and seduction but stop a titillating instant short of actual copulation. The results of such aggressive vivacity remain a mystery. The corpse itself, riddled and gaping, swelling or dismembered, the action of heat and bacteria, of mummification or decay are the most illicit pornography.
Katherine Dunn
I didn't give it much thought back then. I just wanted to get all the words straight and collect my A.
Gayle Forman
The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
George Orwell
There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
Aleksandar Hemon
A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.
Lionel Shriver
Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.
Elizabeth Kolbert
Humans, after all, weren’t actively hostile toward most of the species we’d made extinct over the millennia of our ascendance; they simply weren’t part of our design. The same could turn out to be true of superintelligent machines, which would stand in a similar kind of relationship to us as we ourselves did to the animals we bred for food, or the ones who fared little better for all that they had no direct dealings with us at all.
Mark O'Connell
When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.
Murray Kempton
The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards - they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution - and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked it's gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.
Vasily Grossman
Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
George Orwell
you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.
David Brooks
Pandering candidates often promise that they can make the pain go away.
Gail Collins
Never underestimate the power of a tweet.
Germany Kent
If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
Chuck Klosterman
Media work needs ideals. Maybe thirty years from now, after I retire, I'll see the media mature and make the transition from political party, interest group, and corporate to truly public. But over the next ten years, the encroachment of commercialism and worldliness will loom much larger than the democratization we imagine. -Jin Yongquan in China Ink
Judy Polumbaum
Ideas are like bananas. That bananas grow only in tropical regions doesn't make them any less delicious in Scandinavia.
Eric Weiner
Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.
Leslie T. Chang
In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!
Paul Lafargue
It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable...that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it?
Paul Mason
[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.
Christopher Hitchens
Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
George Monbiot
I had enough of a story churning in my head that combined all the elements of the day—the interview, the concert, the after-party’s private session—when he put his guitar away and asked me if I had ever experimented with homosexuality. Talk about unexpected segues. Letting him know that I had not and wasn’t about to, I successfully changed the subject by asking him to give me a condensed account about traveling to Mississippi in search of Bukka White.
Kenny Weissberg
You won’t be able to do this ten years from now—just leave everything behind and go.
Rachel Kapelke-Dale
Tall men are the most romantically successful group on earth, bar none: more successful than rich people, accomplished people and educated people.
Arianne Cohen
Safe sex? Does such a thing exist?
Garry Crystal
The world always said to just be yourself, but it turned out when Evelyn was herself, no guys were at all interested, so she was left with games of make-believe, expressing enthusiasm for whatever the men wanted to do, be it rock climbing or going to a cheese-beer pairing or a Knicks game.
Stephanie Clifford
How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?
Rachel Kapelke-Dale
But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes. pg 156
Chuck Klosterman
We must have taken a wrong turn turning somewhere.""Where, Purgatory?" said Dozy. "We're in Hell.
John Connolly
Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled.
Christopher Hitchens
Happiness is a habit,it’s more than fleeting,more than a disintegrating lozenge.
Brian D'Ambrosio
THE RELIABLE WAY OUT OF OBESITY IS VIA PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. This point has been lost on the hundreds of folks who have railed against my arguments for food addiction in periodicals, so I"m eager to make it here: No one but me put the food in my mouth. Even if I had grown up imprisoned in a crawl space under the basement stairs (I wasn't), even if tragedy has befallen me every 15 minutes since (it hasn't), I"m still responsible for what I eat. If my food is out of control (it was), then I'm responsible for finding, requesting, and accepting the help I need.
Michael Prager
I don't have a 'side'—I'm responsible for what I say and nothing else.
Glenn Greenwald
Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined.
Robert Winder
Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.
Robert Winder