Quotes by Journalists - Page 49

The lessons learned, then, in Robinson's case: "Additional training is required to inform soldiers of the dangers of self-medicating along with the associated risk of overdosing" is the first. "Encourage the use of a battle buddy among warriors" is the second. "Increase suicide prevention classes" is the third. "Increase communication to twice a day with high-risk soldiers" is the fourth. "Continue improvements in leader communication" is the fifth. And that's that. Eight months. Five minutes. The army moves on to the next suicide. Case forever closed.
David Finkel
The young girl giggled again and Jake shook his head in amazement. Not only was the U.S. dark operative cooking pancakes, but it seemed he'd won over the timid teenager in no time flat."I've been entertaining this pretty girl with my vast repertoire of daring and heroic adventures from around the globe."Jake snorted as he opened the refrigerator and pulled out the container of orange juice. "You sound like Blackbeard the pirate. Don't believe a word he says, Alyssa. He's actually Insurance salesman and lies like a rug.""An Insurance salesman?" She narrowed her eyes at Carter as he flipped three pancackes off the electric griddle sitting on the island and onto a plate for her. "I knew you were conning me," she chastised, then rolled her eyes toward Jake. "He said he was a government spy, like James Bond."After filling a glass, Jake smirked at his friend who shrugged his shoulders and gave the girl a sad puppy-dog expression. "Who are you going to believe, me or Jake from State Farm?
Samantha A. Cole
We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf"--Opening to "My Father's Son," attributed to George Orwell
George Orwell
Maintenance and resupply are the backbone of any military.
Robert Ferrigno
They kill hundreds of people, those pilots. I would have loved to have flown the plane that dropped the bomb on Japan. A couple of dudes killed hundreds of thousands. That f****** rules! Yeah!
Evan Wright
Excited. In a good way. I've been training my whole life for this.
Mark Bowden
Do me a favor, okay? Tell my parents that I fought well today. And tell them that I... that I... that I fought hard.
Mark Bowden
Soon I was weeping---for the reservists who put their entire lives on hold when called to duty, for the military mothers who had to keep their families together all alone, for the parents, spouses, sons, and daughters who were beset with worry, for Mike, and for the soldiers who would never come home. I only meant to buy a shower curtain, and now, quite unexpectedly, right when I least wanted it, months of pent-up loneliness, fear, and frustration were pouring out in an endless churn of hot, silent tears.
Lily Burana
We're like America's little pit bull. They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.
Evan Wright
We could, however, demand much more from the social media sites that are so eager to sign up our kids and encourage them to share, share, share. These companies are selling our kids’ “likes” and habits to advertisers, and enticing all of us to give up more and more of our privacy.
Emily Bazelon
All the things I've ever wanted to say suddenly I've been bold enough to say them on Social Media.
Germany Kent
Social Media brands faster than any other existing Marketing plan and for much cheaper!
Germany Kent
As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.
Clive Thompson
Social media is your platform to build a unique fan base while you express yourself exactly how you see yourself. Build wisely.
Germany Kent
I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama.
Jon Ronson
Twitter, far from fostering debate and broadening minds, has turned us into a hive of scolds. Angry mobs wait on the sidelines to strike and then bask in the glow of their moral superiority.
Mick Hume
I'm not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be.
Rivka Galchen
In the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it-and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.
Nicholas Carr
And yet, for the fully modern being, not being able to tweet or otherwise " share" - feelings, opinions, thoughts, jokes, links to cat videos or pictures of dinner - for even an hour is akin to eternal exile in the desert, and hence in part the rising tide of juror-caused mistrials across the planet.
Christie Blatchford
People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.
Derek Thompson
Soon after Justine Sacco's shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risqué thoughts, that he wouldn't dare to post online anymore.'I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,' he said. 'It's horrible.'He didn't want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.'Look!' we're saying. 'WE'RE normal! THIS is the average!'We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.
Jon Ronson
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the myriad of other services resonate with the basic human urge to be social. The tools have changed, but human behaviour remains consistent.
Alfred Hermida
Sharing our ideas with others is a way of showing what is important to us. We are sending out signals about ourselves as we highlight what we value and care about.
Alfred Hermida
The problem is not in the hashtag; the problem lies in the idea that one’s contribution in spreading said hashtag ends their responsibility towards that particular issue. It is a way of clearing our conscience towards the true atrocities happening around us, because in that moment that we send out a supportive post into the world of the web we set the notion that we are somehow absolved of our sins, for silence is a sin and the hashtag breaks that silence.
Aysha Taryam
It is tempting to say, as my friend suggested, that these online identities are caricatures of the real me. It is certainly true that social media can unleash the cruellest side of human nature.
Derek Thompson
What social-media really becomes after years of use is a constant stream of information both verbal and visual that at first drenches the mind, quenching its thirst for knowledge, and subduing its curiosity slowly but surly transforms into a torrent that renders the brain heavy and the mind restless.
Aysha Taryam
The Arab poet Silm Al Khaser wrote “He who watches people dies of worry” and his words have never been more potent than in today’s world where all people do is watch others and cater to them in return.
Aysha Taryam
Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.
A.J. Liebling
At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
Barbara Ehrenreich
I obscenity in the milk of my shame.
Ernest Hemingway
The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”—
Jon Ronson
I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
Barbara Ehrenreich
When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.
Jon Ronson
[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?
Jon Ronson
Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it.
Charlie Jane Anders
It seems to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.
Jon Ronson
On Saturday mornings Mr Ewing would make his rounds, giving each tradesman £1 and the apprentices, ten shillings. Needless to say, we were all peeping around corners awaiting his arrival!
Ian Thompson
The Bible's "it's better to give than receive" was not the raving of a lunatic. It goes back to a recurring theme that I've found in almost all my experiments: behaviour shapes your thoughts. My brain sees me giving a gift to Julie. My brain concludes I must really love her. I love her all the more. Which means I'm happier in my relationship, if a bit poorer.
A.J. Jacobs
The things you spend so much time on--all this work you do--might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.
Mitch Albom
One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.
David Halberstam
Security is by far the city's predominant business.
Ron Suskind
Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.
George F. Will
In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.
Geraldine Brooks
Sometimes it didn't seem possible that I could be so unhappy, considering how much I had compared to other kids my age, and, believe me, I understood how extremely lucky I was. Sometimes things didn't add up.
Sharon Leach
Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.("The Wendigo")
Algernon Blackwood
(I know, it's a poem but oh well).Why! who makes much of a miracle? As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water, Or stand under trees in the woods, Or talk by day with any one I love--or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, Or sit at table at dinner with my mother, Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive, of a summer forenoon, Or animals feeding in the fields, Or birds--or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sun-down--or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon in spring; Or whether I go among those I like best, and that like me best-- mechanics, boatmen, farmers, Or among the savans--or to the soiree--or to the opera, Or stand a long while looking at the movements of machinery, Or behold children at their sports, Or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman, Or the sick in hospitals, or the dead carried to burial, Or my own eyes and figure in the glass; These, with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, The whole referring--yet each distinct, and in its place.To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same; Every spear of grass--the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them, All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.To me the sea is a continual miracle; The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the ships, with men in them, What stranger miracles are there?
Walt Whitman
Most people weren't wired to see miracles, even when one was staring them in the face.
Greg Mitchell
Miracles happen quietly every day—in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a roadside stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score.But now and then, a miracle is declared to the world.And when that happens, things change
Mitch Albom
Miracles are commonplace in religious scripture. Our ancient ancestors are said to have felt Jesus' wounds, verified Muhammad's ascent to heaven, and even interacted with their respective deities directly. Today, believers have no such luxury. They are forced to rely on blind faith that these things occurred, that people were at one time able to overcome or render inert natural laws.
David G. McAfee
Actually, the “leap of faith”—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a “leap” that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the “leap” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn’t in fact rely on “faith” at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected “proofs.” This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are.
Christopher Hitchens
To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.
François Mauriac
Still, as much as I had experienced, there was more waiting to be found. I had started out with a feeling of burning dullness and desperation. Now I was filled with a thrill and expectation of new discovery.
Peter Jenkins
Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need—but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are.
Clarice Lispector
Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?
Clarice Lispector
I dreaded an invasion of ghosts or, less likely, an invasion of the police.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Though Abdul had been as afraid of ghosts as most Annawadi boys, these reports did not disturb him. Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.
Katherine Boo
During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms.
Gabriel García Márquez
You hear about ghosts: sad ghosts, angry ghosts.I'll tell you, the worst is when they laugh, and the worst sort are the ones whose faces I've forgotten.
Richard Smyth
Okay. When he comes, you can see him?""Yes. I can hear him, too. And he, uh..."She brushed the bandage on the side of her skull. I looked at her in bewilderment. Was she serious?"He hits you?""Yes.""With his fist?""Yes."John looked up from his coffee indignantly. "Man, what a dick!"I did roll my eyes this time and glared at John once they stopped. I don't know if you've ever seen a ghost, but I'm guessing that if you did, the thing didn't run over and punch you in the face. I'm guessing that's never happened to any of your friends, either.
David Wong
Cinders, I would've thought you of all people would know better. There are no wicked stepmothers and there are no fairy godmothers, and there are no Prince Charmings. There in no preordained destiny. You get to decide that. You decide your destiny. - V
Gayle Forman