Quotes by Journalists - Page 94

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez
Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
Gabriel García Márquez
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occa
Albert Camus
Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.
Matt Haig
A million years is a short time - the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.
John McPhee
Both of them loved the earth and the things that grew in it.
Sandra Dallas
The way it feels to me,' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.
Michael Lewis
Outside the bus the smell of sulphur hit Bond with sickening force. It was a horrible smell, from somewhere down in the stomach of the world.
Ian Fleming
Then he was sorry for the great fish... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.
Ernest Hemingway
May you live forever, and may I never die.
Elaine Viets
Those who deserve to die, die the death they deserve.
Ian Fleming
We only get one life. Wasting someone’s time is the subtlest form of murder.
Lindy West
Sometimes destiny switches the cards on you so that while you're busy escaping from the dog, you find yourself facing the wolf
Susana Fortes
The only people who fear death are the ones who haven't lived.
Gemma Malley
He told himself that he could die some other time, in some other place.
Jonas Jonasson
To create is to live twice.
Albert Camus
A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set us a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific text-book, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact.
George Orwell
David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.
David Lipsky
The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult."The intolerable burden of thought.
Walter Lippmann
A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.
Ambrose Bierce
Pete and Repeat went out in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was saved?
Gayle Forman
I've seen what rational thought leads to. Dumbest people I ever met were intellectuals.
Robert Ferrigno
We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.
George Orwell
Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands.
H.L. Mencken
ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested.A striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself, whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.
Ambrose Bierce
Why didn’t you dare it before? he asked harshly.When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That’s the question. I’ve been asking myself for many a day. My brain is the same old brain. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself the same olf self they did not want. They must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I. Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have recieved. That recognition is not I. Then again for the money I have earned and am earnin. But money is not I. And is it for the recognition and money, that you now want me?
Jack London
...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
Jonah Lehrer
America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness...
Lance Morrow
We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.
H.L. Mencken
It’s just amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there.
Andy Rooney
All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.
Hunter S. Thompson
what doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest.
Eric Weiner
In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.
Mark Helprin
America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.
A.A. Gill
In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.
Eduardo Galeano
America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can't fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.
Matt Taibbi
After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my mind’s eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense.
Matt Taibbi
America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.
John O'Hara
rip the prisonsopenput theconvictsontelevision
Norman Mailer
The thing they're trying to stop is 30-million people getting health insurance. That's the substance.
Chris Hayes
Let's run the experiment.
Chris Hayes
You can make a successful run for political office in this country without an especially thick résumé, any exceptional talent for expressing yourself, a noteworthy education or, for that matter, a basic grasp of science.But you better have religion. You better be ready to profess your faith in and fealty to God — the Judeo-Christian one, of course. And you better be convincing. A dust-up last week in the 2014 race for a United States Senate seat from Arkansas provided a sad reminder of this, showing once again that our ballyhooed separation of church and state is less canyon than itty-bitty crack.
Frank Bruni
I really believe that when we start talking ourselves back, we'll have more to offer the world." he [Woodenkinfe] said. "I don't want a gray world.""You mean taking back our cultures and where we come from.""Absolutely! You want to talk about the fabric of this country, that's it.""So rather than a melting pot, it would be a...""A blanket of color, all sewn in the shape of the U.S.
Philip Caputo
Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.
Hunter S. Thompson
A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be another shift of civilization, like past departures of the era of kings, the time of slavery, the Agricultural Age, the epoch of colonialism, and the like. Such cultural transformations are partly invisible to contemporary people, but become obvious in retrospect.
James A. Haught
Ten years after the Boston Tea Party, tea was still far more popular than coffee, which only became the more popular drink in the mid-nineteenth century. Coffee's popularity grew after the duty on imports was abolished in 1832, making it more affordable. The duty was briefly reintroduced during the Civil War but was abolished again in 1872.
Tom Standage
I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.
Hunter S. Thompson
I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil's opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn't worry about your paintings anymore. I'm not going to steal them. I don't like them.Sincerely yours, P. Soames
Mark Helprin
Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven Seconds.
John dos Passos
This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Hunter S. Thompson
The American political system is like fast food--mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things...and everybody wants some.
P.J. O'Rourke
American dream,a spouse,a brace of children,cuddly pets,coffee-table books,rusted skeleton keys,plastic cauliflower bags,business cards of business-card printers,a mound of used airmail envelopes. Old house on moving day,all echoes and loneliness.
Brian D'Ambrosio
America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.
Michael Gold
Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things. But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally compelling challenge to humanity, but as a burden, and largely as one to be evaded as much as possible.
Howard W. French
Africa occupied a relatively blank space in the minds of most Americans, and when they stopped to think about it, aided by old and deeply ingrained habits of press coverage, all they could imagine was volcano, occupation, disease, and horror.
Howard W. French
Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.
Fareed Zakaria
I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself... I was was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger — I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American journalism—although we know they are untrue.
Chris Hedges
There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.
Sarah Vowell