Quotes by Journalists - Page 78

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men".
Sebastian Junger
Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they seek to address.
Reni Eddo-Lodge
Although people are such beings that if there were only three of them in the world, one of them would have been their leader, still in everyone, without any exceptions, there is a natural desire to have at least an illusion of equality. This desire has the king and the pauper, and the adult and the child, for this is the manifestation of the eternal truth about the equality of all before God.
Osyp Nazaruk
Your life depends on a random stranger who could kill you, will probably disrespect you, and will most likely pay you much less than you deserve. But even those prospects are better than the ones you used to have. This is the life of los jornaleros – the day laborers.
Gustavo Arellano
ThoughtOf equality- as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chancesand rights as myself- as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.
Walt Whitman
Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H.L. Mencken
...I'm not in control and without a firm spot, like Archimedes I can't move the world - let alone your heart..
John Geddes
...freedom of conscience does not mean being uncontrolled - we have to control ourselves and at times submit to others...
John Geddes
...I'm a modern mountebank - I believe in Physiognomy - after all, we are in control of our face - it's the map of where we've been...
John Geddes
Fear sells better than sex and the iPhone 5 combined.
Greg Palast
Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.
Chuck Klosterman
The control of your mind is most important, and it will be worth your while. You must think deeply. Clear your mind of all bad, unwanted thoughts
William O'Brien
Control.... is not what we need.What we need is to bend to the tempest like pine and palm trees - flexible, adaptive, attuned, yet fully rooted in our principles.
Patricia Pearson
Every rule, every chart, every geeky statistic in a game book or module feeds into this impulse. All those details allow us to take apart existence, look at the individual parts, figure out how they work, and put them back together. Some people relieve stress by getting drunk or high and losing control; nerds find comfort by taking control and applying structure. Logic is like a warm blanket.
David M. Ewalt
I overheard a young man once saying to his wife, "I can't control you. That's the problem and it's been the problem ever since day one!" And then I heard her answer him and heard her terrible voice. "No!" she said. "The problem isn't that you can't control me, the problem is that you're trying to. Why don't you stop worrying about controlling me and start worrying about controlling yourself?
Merle Shain
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don't say anything because we're frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
Mitch Albom
So it came to this, that— against the grain, no doubt—the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order! This, I thought, was a flaw in the system; and, on the face of it, my view was sound enough. On the other hand, I had to admit it proved the efficiency of the system. It came to this; the man under sentence was obliged to collaborate mentally, it was in his interest that all should go off without a hitch.
Albert Camus
The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
George Orwell
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]
Jerry Pournelle
It's funny, in a human kind of way, how we can convince ourselves that we're in control at the very moment we are beginning to lose it.
William Moyers
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
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
Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Who thinks to interview their own mother? As a self-fixated teen, I never imagined that she had an actual personal history. To my young eyes, she was Source of Cash Obsessed With De-Cluttering
Jancee Dunn
It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older.
John Lanchester
But then, I knew so little about my mother over the last decade of her life. I had been too wrapped up in my own drama.
Mitch Albom
Going back to something is harder than you think."I don't suppose I could have broken my mother's heart any more if I tried.
Mitch Albom
Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.
Jojo Moyes
Mother, death, love -- everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination.
Kamel Daoud
A mother's lap is the strongest hub and school of each religion. In other words, the mother breezes and waves the religion since the mother is a religion.
Ehsan Sehgal
A mother's lap is the strongest hub and school of each religion. In other words, the mother breezes and waves the religion since she is the religion.
Ehsan Sehgal
She used to call me on the phone and scream, “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I AM GOING TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES SO SMALL, YOU WILL BE A POWDER AND NO ONE WILL FIND YOU.
Scaachi Koul
The school is a mother
Edmondo de Amicis
I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
Lionel Shriver
I love you every day,Mom
Mitch Albom
Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin.
Mitch Albom
February 13, 1936I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps...Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.
Albert Camus
A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.
Lionel Shriver
Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:
Alexander Cockburn
Investigating Koreiko's case might take a long time," said Ostap. "God only knows how long. And since there is no God, nobody knows. We are in a terrible bind.
Ilya Ilf
She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.
Candice Millard
the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.” p141
Tim Butcher
And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.
Brian Moore
Day after day he roamed about in the arctic cold, his soul filled full of bitterness and despair. He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not.
Upton Sinclair
She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence.
Upton Sinclair
Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.
Michael Pollan
I refuse to believe that gods want to make mortals unhappy and torment them. That's what humans do. And humans are very definitely not divine.
Karen Traviss
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
A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer
John Connolly
Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.
Matt Haig
Humans are destructive animals, but they are also wise ones.
Gemma Malley
The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.
Matt Haig
The next day I had a hangover.I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.
Matt Haig
Now, consider this.　　A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.
Matt Haig
Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable.
Albert Camus
And this is precisely where the tension lies: Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous sense of entitlement to the resources around us. If a tiger can poach on another's territory, it probably will, and so, of course, will we. A key difference, however, is that tigers only take what they need.
John Vaillant
Humans don’t connect their actions with what befalls them. Don’t they perceive time as linear?”"They do,” said Aitassi. “They just don’t see why they should do anything individually to change their future to the one they want. All eight billion of them.
Karen Traviss
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
Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.
Matt Haig
I looked at all the caged animals. . . . . . . the cast-offs of human society. I saw in their eyes love and hope, fear and dread, sadness and betrayal. And I was angry."God," I said, "this is terrible! Why don't you do something?"God was silent for a moment and then He spoke softly."I have done something. . .I created you.
Jim Willis