Quotes by Journalists - Page 71

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
The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
George Monbiot
...open the access to your heart and write down what your voice is whispering...
John Geddes
Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
George Orwell
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Ernest Hemingway
A simple pecking order has always characterized mankind's relationship to waste: The wealthy throw out what they do not want, the poor scavenge what they can, and whatever remains is left to rot.
Dan Fagin
Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.
Edward Humes
When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.
Henry Hazlitt
..either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.
Henry Hazlitt
He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.
H.L. Mencken
We want books that are written for those of us who doubt everything, who cry over the least little thing, who are startled by the slightest noise.
Laurence Cossé
She tries to maintain a nondescript exterior; she learns the sideways glance instead of looking at people directly. She speaks in practised, precise sentences so that she is not misunderstood. She chooses her words carefully, and if someone addresses her in Punjabi, she answers in Urdu, because an exchange in her mother tongue might be considered a promise of intimacy. She uses English for medical terms only, because she feels if she uses a word of English in her conversation she might be considered a bit forward. When she walks she walks with slightly hurried steps, as if she has an important but innocent appointment to keep. She avoids eye contact, she looks slightly over people’s heads as if looking out for somebody who might come into view at any moment. She doesn’t want anyone to think that she is alone and nobody is coming for her. She sidesteps even when she sees a boy half her age walking towards her, she walks around little puddles when she can easily leap over them; she thinks any act that involves stretching her legs might send the wrong signal. After all, this is not the kind of thing where you can leave your actions to subjective interpretations. She never eats in public. Putting something in your mouth is surely an invitation for someone to shove something horrible down your throat. If you show your hunger, you are obviously asking for something.
Mohammed Hanif
Doubt is part of searching. Same as faith.
Gayle Forman
Science is implausible to untutored human common sense, but that in no way casts doubt on the correctness of well-established scientific findings. Feelings of transcendence are simply that—feelings—and, as such, have no capacity to reveal truths about a world external to the people who have them.
Russell Blackford
Al he knew was that he'd never met anyone who caused him to doubt and to hope as much as she did.
Catherine Bennett
Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted].
Christopher Hitchens
Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.
Clifford D. Simak
It's true that Thomas was a doubter, but he was not a cynic, and that's an important distinction. Cynics often look for reasons not to believe and won't be moved by something beautiful—just to make a point—even if it's staring them down. Thomas wasn't a cynic, he was a hopeful doubter; he'd believe if he could.
Jonathan Martin
...he began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears into the sea.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
They were like two poor little leaves in a storm which bore death and annihilation not only to the heads of individuals, but to whole towns and entire tribes. What hand could snatch it and save two small, defenseless children?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from his lips that he had acted like a true Pole! The end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.
Mignon McLaughlin
When you cross a challenge that is expansive and deep, you may not even realize when you’ve come to the other side. That day will come. And when it does, how will you look at your crossing?
Teresa Hirst
One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against.
Joshua Rothman
Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer.
Upton Sinclair
The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.
Michael Pollan
I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts. (Edward Curtis)
Timothy Egan
Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master.
Mark O'Connell
Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.
Chuck Klosterman
O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!
Albert Camus
Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)
Max Hastings
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
Ernest Hemingway
She feels "Brutal Dynasty" actually may become the Great American Novel she and her fellow critics have been looking for so long.
Clyde Brion Davis
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
This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, 'USA!' someone else ironically chants back, 'Mother Russia.
Jon Ronson
The days are numbered for those bums over in England."German Tank commander
Leo McKinstry
quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.
D.T. Max
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
Scary discovery of the day: Most people who RT @yokoono's tweets do so without irony.
James Taranto
I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable.
Binyavanga Wainaina
In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.
Christopher Hitchens
Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.
David Denby
How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.
Christopher Hitchens
When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
Albert Camus
When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.
Christopher Hitchens
The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
Christopher Hitchens
We want the kind of love that sells movie tickets.
Sarah Jio
most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.
David Brooks
Anything you want can come true if you cast it in the form of a "golden goal" and apply EFT-Matrix Reimprinting to get clear and activate it "in the matrix".
Caryl Westmore
Modest, conventional expectations weren't enough to lure Adam Brown away from the power of drug addiction that ensnared him. Instead, the college dropout already in his mid-twenties found only the big, near-impossible dream of being a Navy SEAL captivating enough to consistently draw him to different choices.
Eric Blehm
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.”-“It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.”Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.
Walter Isaacson
One thing that unites triumphant entrepreneurs, whether in Brooklyn, San Francisco or Great Falls, Montana, is strength of character.Individuality is the goal that we all strive to excel at in some way; the notion that we are distinct, special, that there is something teachable about our wisdom, something remarkable about our outlook.
Brian D'Ambrosio
Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past.
Hunter S. Thompson
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...
Joan Didion
So I wonder what it is this need to tell.To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.
Peter Heller
Caught red-handed for exclamation abuse.
Buffy Andrews
One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)
Jeannette Walls
I don't believe in writers' block. Do doctors have 'doctors block?' Do plumbers have 'plumbers' block?" No. We all have days when we don't feel like working, but why do writers turn that into something so damn special by giving it a faintly romantic name.
Larry Kahaner
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
Ernest Hemingway