Quotes by Journalists - Page 47

Why is it that we who have enjoyed the human free­doms which our forefathers fought so hard to win and to bequeath to us, do not, with the example of Russia before us, realize the horrors of life without freedom? Why is it that we cannot understand that there is no such thing as embracing Communism as an experiment? It is a one-way street, ending in a cul de sac of secret police terror, firing squads for the intellectuals and leaders and concentration camps and slave labor for the masses. There is no turning back; there is no escape.
Freda Utley
The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands - communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.
Amin Maalouf
…is there anyone so deaf that he cannot hear in Byzantine churches some echo of the Catacombs? What could be more natural than that just as martyrs made paintings for martyrs, latter-day bureaucrats paint for bureaucrats?
Miklos Haraszti
But the cruel quirk in the situation is that conditions on the other side of the line are so hopeless that 500 are now returning out of the 1000 who escaped daily. There is no place for them in Germany.....Nothing reveals the present state of affairs more clearly than the fact that people who risk their lives to get out of Soviet territory take the greater risk of going back when they see what awaits them outside.
Anne O'Hare McCormick
Tech-savvy types had figured out how to get around the system. With radios it was easy—open up the set, cut the conveyor belt attached to the dial, and replace it with a rubber band that could turn the dial wherever you liked. Television required a little more expertise.
Barbara Demick
Her younger son, twenty, was assigned to a factory that made railroad equipment, but since it provided no salary he was actually paying his workplace three dollars per month so he could stay home to help his mother with the pigs and moonshine.
Barbara Demick
North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world.
Barbara Demick
Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
Barbara Demick
You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism.'No, I didn’t. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'.
Arthur Koestler
If you thing political correctness is no big deal, just remember that the communists started by eliminating inconvenient speech and ended by eliminating inconvenient people.
James Crabtree
He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed — and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life.
George Orwell
If the immediate postwar period had been characterized by violent attacks on the existing institutions of civil society, after 1948 the regimes [of Eastern Europe] began instead to create a new system of state-controlled schools and mass organizations which would envelop their citizens from the moment of birth. Once inside this totalitarian system, it was assumed, the citizens of of the communist states would never want or be able to leave it. They were meant to become, in the sarcastic phrasing of an old Soviet dissident, members of the species Homo sovieticus, Soviet man. Not only would Homo Sovieticus never oppose communism; he could never even conceive of opposing communism.
Anne Applebaum
Take Tom Jones and mix him with Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor-cum-castrato singer. Then add tons of pathetic love songs, faked sex appeal and musical kleptomania focusing on Western hits from the 1970s. Spice it up with a political flexibility rare even for Central European standards and a personal status close to that of the Pope. What do you get? Karel Gott, Czech pop music's most mega-super, long-lasting and brightest star.
Terje B. Englund
Logically, when Maestro Gott some years ago, after an especially cruel critic had compared him to "a zombie who causes acute depression to innocent radio listeners", decided to stop performing in protest, the situation was considered so grave that the Minister of Culture himself went to console the deeply insulted star.
Terje B. Englund
…The story of the Pledge of Allegiance and its National Socialist roots is a fascinating one. Dr. Rex Curry, a passionate libertarian, has made the issue his white whale.
Jonah Goldberg
Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well.
Svetlana Alexievich
Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.
Vasily Grossman
[It is b]etter to die on the losing side than to live under communisim.
Whittaker Chambers
For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings of her course. Her course had many twists and windings; such was the law of her being. And whosoever could not follow her crooked course was washed on to the bank, for such was her law. The motives of the individual did not matter to her. His conscience did not matter to her, neither did she care what went on in his head and his heart. The Party knew only one crime: to swerve from the course laid out; and only one punishment: death. Death was no mystery in the movement; there was nothing exalted about it: it was the logical solution to political divergences
Arthur Koestler
You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.
Christopher Hitchens
Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively...
Masha Gessen
Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why...In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you...our neighbor Yuri turned out to have been the one who informed on my father. For nothing, as my mother would say...When Yeltsin came to power, I got a copy of his file, which included several informants' reports. It turned out that one of them had been written by Aunt Olga...his niece...a beautiful woman, full of joy...It's not just Stalin and Beria, it's also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga...
Svetlana Alexievich
He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on.
Aleksandar Hemon
If you ignore what a man desires, and you deny the very source of his power.
Walter Lippmann
History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
Ian Fleming
Kill the heroes and you kill the soul of a nation.
Robert Ferrigno
That’s what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end.
Lise Hand
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.
Ellen Goodman
he most effective lie is ninety-nine percent true.
Robert Ferrigno
The most effective lie is ninety-nine percent true.
Robert Ferrigno
And came to her a realization that the largest humiliation for the person was a lie. And the viler the one to whom you lie, the greater is the humiliation.
Osyp Nazaruk
The very secret of life for me, I believed, was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility.
Margaret Bourke-White
Stirton's work, he says, is now all about investigation. 'You literally are trying to find out what's happening and, finally, manoeuvre yourself to the point where you can take a picture, and then you're presented with a 20-minute window where it's: Okay, now get your picture!' His voice is charged with emotion. 'Fucking angst and worry and, you know, FEAR of failure – every aspect of that comes into those 20 minutes, so it's a very intense experience. So when I make those pictures, I'm worried; I’m nervous.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
What's required of me in the field is to feel,' Stirton says with emphasis. 'And trying to take that feeling and put it in a form that communicates a particular set of emotions or circumstances - whether that involves depicting masculine pride, or a particular kind of suffering, or love, or closeness - my primary job is to feel and to try to put that feeling into some kind of visual form. My goal is to get to the heart of each story, you know? I’m trying to evolve in my work.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.
Émile Zola
Pictures can be pretty deceptive.
Gayle Forman
The instant before something comes into focus is more exciting than any sharp certainty. Photography, child, is about the passing of time. Capturing is the goal of literature. Timelessness is the task of music and painting. But a good photograph holds time just as a vase holds water. The water will evaporate and the vase becomes a memorial to it. What separates a snapshot from a masterpiece is that the latter is a metaphor of patience...
Miguel Syjuco
To photograph people is to obligate them in some way to face things they weren't expecting to.
Susana Fortes
I've hardly taken any pictures on this trip. Melanie teased me about it, to which I always said I preferred to experience something rather than obsessively record it. Though, really, the truth of it was, unlike Melanie (who wanted to remember the shoe salesman and the mime and the cute waiter and all the other people on the tour), none of that really mattered to me. At the start of the trip, I took shots of the sights. The Colosseum. Belvedere Palace. Mozart Square. But I stopped. They never came out very well, and you could get postcards of these things.But there are no postcards of this. Of life.
Gayle Forman
Therein lies the key, I think, to Einstein's brilliance and the lessons of his life. As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity.
Walter Isaacson
He looks at me and then, reverting to the voice he'd used with Kendra, says, 'If homegirls wanna see me as ghetto trash'--he stops and switches to his lispy, sassy voice--'or big-ass queer'--now he switches to his deepest Shakespeare voice--'I shall not take it upon myself to disabuse them.
Gayle Forman
But you don't hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?" she protested."No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my right as an individual. I have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. The world's judges of music may all be right. But I am I, and I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don't like a thing, I don't like it, that's all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can't follow the fashions in the things I like or dislike.
Jack London
For the most part, I did trust my own judgement. But I was more than capable of screwing up. Just, sometimes, I forgot about that in my quest to move forward.
Gwenda Bond
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
Albert Camus
Well, they never know they're ill, do they? You can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. So, I suppose you just feel normal and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.
David Wong
The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be "off-loaded" to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion.
Lawrence Wright
We all have our routines," he said softly."But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.
John Connolly
You must be crazy, after all, if a bird loves you.
Andrew Smith
A world between my fingers.
Andrew Smith
It's no wonder I became a monster, too.
Andrew Smith
Not a very pretty world, is it?""Which one?
Andrew Smith
But Jack doesn'
Andrew Smith
I am going to build something big for you.
Andrew Smith
I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you're not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
Jon Ronson
The United States is an easy country to love because you can take it on faith that, at some point in every waking hour of the day, there is among your fellow citizens a vast exaltation of opinions that test the outer boundaries of the Crazoid.
Charles P. Pierce
...That Great Cocktail Cabinet in the Sky...
Nigella Lawson
I don't want a rainbow... Rainbows have too many colors and none of them receive the appreciation they deserve... I'd prefer a fading red or a striking golden, a shimmery silver or a sober blue... Ruling the sunset sky alone!
Debalina Haldar
An earthquake is such fun when it is over.
George Orwell
Every girl needs a bit of whimsy to remind her that life is a game and it's all about having fun.
Candace Havens
All round there was a rising tide of beer, widow Désir's barrels had all been broached, beer had rounded all paunches and was overflowing in all directions, from noses, eyes - and elsewhere. People were so blown out and higgledy-piggledy, that everybody's elbows or knees were sticking into his neighbour and everybody thought it great fun to feel his neighbour's elbows. All mouths were grinning from ear to ear in continuous laughter.
Émile Zola