Quotes by Journalists - Page 91

So how did you end up making a fool of yourself in front of twenty thousand people?I had a bigger hole to fill.What do you mean?A rock star is someone with a hole in his heart almost the size of his ego.
Michka Assayas
It’s natural to think of one’s own life as a novel (or a movie or a play), and within that narrative we are always the central character. Thoughtful people try to overcome this compulsion, but they usually fail (in fact, trying makes it worse). In a commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace argued that conquering the preoccupation with self is pretty much the whole objective of being alive — but if we are to believe Wallace succeeded at this goal, it must be the darkest success imaginable.
Chuck Klosterman
he was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.
David Halberstam
EGO will destroy you as soon as possible.
Kaushal Patel
We are imperfect creatures created with egotistical defects, insecurities and an incomprehensible desire for perfection and the excessive use of social media feeds the raging fires within, most of the time adding salt to wounds we never knew existed and at times creating new ones.
Aysha Taryam
The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.
Tahir Shah
...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.
José Saramago
All you can try to do is be better than you were yesterday, everyday.
Marcus Harrison Green
To be defeated, but not to give in, is victory.- Jósef Piłsudski
Neal Ascherson
The fatigue of the climb was great but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one's second wind. I think that is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one's mental efforts. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existance of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as second wind. Whether mentally or physically occupied most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion. Thus they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort...
Agnes Elizabeth née Ernst Meyer
The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?''Of course. Who said it?''I don't know.''He was probably a coward,' she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.
Ernest Hemingway
We ended up our talk by my asking Dennis his feelings now about the Marines. Any regrets for all those wounds? Or about having been sent to and having to fight an unpopular war?"No. The Marine Corps meant a tremendous amount to me. And even today I gain momentum from it. The Corps is one of the prime reasons Marines are so successful in whatever we do - because we refuse to quit.
James Brady
Anyone can dig a ditch. There's no way to dig smarter. Or dig faster. Having a baby is like being assigned to dig a ditch. That goes all the way to the horizon.
Jonathan V Last
if one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.
Robert A. Caro
For me, those weeks in Boston, with Wilma, became a lesson in her ability to be “of good mind,” in her phrase, which also meant a people’s ability to survive.
Gloria Steinem
In the eyes of Buddha, there are no evil people, only people who don't yet have light in their hearts.
Lijia Zhang
And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now—my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually plucked me from the sea.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Venture to a remote corner of a faraway land and, from the moment you get there, every person and every thing becomes an obstacle, designed to entrap you, to stop you proceeding on your way.
Tahir Shah
... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.
José Saramago
The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.
I.F. Stone
It's the climbing that makes the man. Getting to the top is an extra reward.
Robert Lipsyte
Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.
Frank Delaney
The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs
Hunter S. Thompson
...when you look at the stars, you should tremble - only dullards have become callous to this frisson ...
John Geddes
....my sacred landscape is the foothills of the stars - I go there often to sleep ...
John Geddes
...once I saw you in moonlight and I can tell you - the silvery dust of the stars doesn't shimmer like you...
John Geddes
...you ask me why I compare you to stars - it's simple - that's where your goddess has fled...
John Geddes
...I can’t grasp the stars, but I love them – in the same way, I love you...
John Geddes
...I remember your profile in darkness outlined by stars ...
John Geddes
I am in love with the stars of night - I have made them audible...
John Geddes
Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.
Ernest Hemingway
Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.
Mark Helprin
The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity.
Will Self
the fragrance of pine resin is frankincense poured out—a balm of stars and snow and moonlit nights
John Geddes
It's only people, as far as we know, who look up at the stars and wonder what they are.
Ian Leslie
We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. "Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten," Dad said, "you'll still have your stars.
Jeannette Walls
If you had stars inside your brain cells, you'd probably understand what I am talking about.
Ernest Hemingway
Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.
Jeannette Walls
So, without telling any of my Zen-snob buddies, I liked to pretend everything was the Pure Land, that my life was already perfect as it was.
Jaimal Yogis
In all these assaults on the senses there is a great wisdom — not only about the addictiveness of pleasures but about their ephemerality. The essence of addiction, after all, is that pleasure tends to desperate and leave the mind agitated, hungry for more. The idea that just one more dollar, one more dalliance, one more rung on the ladder will leave us feeling sated reflects a misunderstanding about human nature — a misunderstanding, moreover, that is built into human nature; we are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there. Natural selection has a malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying ‘Just kidding.’ As the Bible puts it, ‘All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.’ Remarkably, we go our whole lives without ever really catching on.The advice of the sages — that we refuse to play this game — is nothing less than an incitement to mutiny, to rebel against our creator. Sensual pleasures are the whip natural selection uses to control us to keep us in the thrall of its warped value system. To cultivate some indifference to them is one plausible route to liberation. While few of us can claim to have traveled far on this route, the proliferation of this scriptural advice suggests it has been followed some distance with some success.
Robert Wright
...don't you realize a flawless profile means nothing when a mere smile drives me to desperation? Don't you covet that power?..
John Geddes
My dogs have been the reason I have woken up every single day of my life with a smile on my face.
Jennifer Skiff
I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
there is no game in her smile. There is warmth and kindness and something that looks like steel. You can tell me anything, her eyes say, because I will see the beauty in everything you say.
Rene Denfeld
In books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be.
Barbara Ehrenreich
I want to marry his smile, and if his smile is already married to someone else, then I want to marry his eyebrows and eyes. They're remarkable. Nobody's ever made better use of his or her eyes or eyebrows as a rapper than Kurtis Blow.
Shea Serrano
Smile fragrances one's reflection of the inner, which inspires others pleasure feeling.
Ehsan Sehgal
Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.
William T. Vollmann
The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.
George Orwell
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.
Frank Herbert
He'd shot and beaten people because he couldn't talk to them.Violence was the only language nobody could understand. There were no translators.
James Meek
One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn’t done anything wrong, wasn’t even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn’t stop. And when I finally did stop, I’d expended all this energy and frustration, and I’m thinking what in God’s sweet name did I do.
Gail A. Eisnitz
One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.
Jacob Appelbaum
Go that way, past the viaduct, and the wops will jump you, or chase you into Jew town...Polacks would stomp on you...Micks will shower you with Irish confetti from the brickyards.
Mike Royko
To cope, he and his siblings – older and younger sisters, a younger brother - created a game called Henry Kissinger. Palahniuk remembers that as their parents fought, lots would be drawn to see who would play Kissinger. 'This was the early to mid-70s, when Kissinger was a hero, forging peace in the Middle East,' he explains. 'Whoever became Henry Kissinger would have to go and redirect our parents’ attention or anger to a different crisis.' The child who drew the short straw would severely hurt himself, presenting himself as 'this injured thing' in an effort to diffuse conflict.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Isn't it amazing that, historically, the "Prince of Peace" has most often been introduced to new cultures through extreme violence? European and American colonialists bring this disparity to light in a way that makes me wish that forced conversion didn't work so extraordinarily well.
David G. McAfee
Critics of soccer contend that the game inherently culminates in death and destruction. They argue that the game gives life to tribal identities which should be disappearing in a world where a European Union and globalization are happily shredding such ancient sentiments. Another similar widely spread thesis that holds that the root cause of violence can be found in the pace of the game itself. Because goals come so irregularly, fans spend far too much time sublimating their emotions, anticipating but never releasing. When those emotions swell and become uncontainable, the fans erupt into dark, Dionysian fits of ecstatic violence.
Franklin Foer
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. . . . No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today—and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us—they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.
Hunter S. Thompson
The purpose of the bayonet training, Sergeant Gerheim explains, is to awaken our killer instincts. The killer instinct will make us fearless and aggressive, like animals. If the meek ever inherit the earth the strong will take it away from them. The weak exist to be devoured by the strong. Every Marine must pack his own gear. Every Marine must be the instrument of his own salvation. It's hard, but there it is.
Gustav Hasford
I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.
Molly Ivins