Quotes by Journalists - Page 95

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.
Alistair Cooke
For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams.
Mei Fong
Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Americans were folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything.
Rinker Buck
In more than half of American homes where there are both children and firearms, according to a 2000 study, the weapons are in an unlocked place, and in more than 40 percent of homes, guns without a trigger lock are in an unlocked place. Almost three-quarters of children under the age of ten who live in homes with guns say they know where the guns are. A 2005 study showed that more than 1.69 million children and youth under eighteen live in homes with weapons that are loaded and unlocked. According to a Department of Education study, 65% of school shootings between 1974 and 2000 were carried out with a gun from the attacker's home or the home of a relative. And the laws, it seems, are effective. One study indicated that in the twelve states where child-access prevention laws were on the books for at least one year, unintentional gun deaths fell by 23 percent.
Gary Younge
Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened, "writes Leovy in Ghettoside. "Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.
Gary Younge
So long as you have a society with a lot of guns- and America has more guns per capita than any other county in the world- children will be at risk of being shot. The questions are how much risk, and what, if anything, is being done to minimize it? If one thinks of various ways in which commonplace items, from car seats to medicine bottle tops, have been childproofed, it's clear that society's general desire has been to eliminate as many potential dangers from children as possible, even when the number of those who might be harmed is relatively small. If one child's death is preventable, then the proper question isn't "Why should we do this" but rather "Why shouldn't we?" It would be strange for that principle to apply to everything but guns.
Gary Younge
[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
To be black in America is a wild and endless assault on the senses. You can spend every day fighting off your spiritual and intellectual extinction.
Carvell Wallace
But if America falters in greatness and purpose, than Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands.
Theodore H. White
Americans appreciate bad taste or America wouldn’t look the way America does.
P.J. O'Rourke
Being on the frontier, as I've said, required doing rather than imagining: clearing land, building shelter, obtaining food supplies. Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money - an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative.
Robert D. Kaplan
In that country, rich or poor, a man was free... So America was a place of which lovers and young people dreamed.
Upton Sinclair - The Jungle
In America access is always about architecture and never about human beings. Among Israelis and Palestinians, access was rarely about anything but people. While in the U.S. a wheelchair stands out as an explicitly separate experience from the mainstream, in the Israel and Arab worlds it is just another thing that can go wrong in a place where things go wrong all the time.
John Hockenberry
If America is the land of opportunity, a country where perseverance and hard work is rewarded by recognition, then an illegal harbors the opposite ambitions. His greatest reward us anonymity, invisibility. Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he's never counted.
Bella Pollen
A Spaniard and a Pole worked in the barbershop where we got our hair cut. An Italian shined our shoes. A Croat washed our car. This was America.
Ilya Ilf
You cannot criticize Israel in this country (USA) and survive
Helen Thomas
Every man has two counties--his own and America.
Max Lerner
Clearly it's not all that pacific on the Pacific Ocean
Ilya Ilf
This (San Francisco) is the most beautiful city in America, Probably because it looks nothing like America
Ilya Ilf
America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.
Charles P. Pierce
There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
H.L. Mencken
This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.
Paul Johnson
a simple question to identify your true home: where do you want to die?
Eric Weiner
You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—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.
Hunter S. Thompson
America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
Walter Cronkite
You could make mistakes when you lived together because you knew you'd wake up the next morning with another chance.
Ariel Sabar
Next time I get sick, you can tell that to me. You can be my girl in the mountains.""Okay", I say."I'll be your mountain girl and take care of you.
Gayle Forman
Desperation will drive you to do things you know will never make you whole again and even to lose the very thing you’re desperate for.
Laura Miller
I’ll save a spot for you on the hood of my truck.
Laura Miller
Because I seeA rainstorm in JuneJust before the sunThe black of nightJust before the starsAnd, girl, I see your ghostJust before our dawn
Laura Miller
Maybe we knew each other in another life. Or maybe we were just meant to find each other in this one.
Laura Miller
I just want you to know that I love you with everything I am—a million times a million and to the moon and back.
Laura Miller
Little girl, little boyIf love has a wayFill their fields with laughterAnd scatter the sun on their dayAnd if it should happen to rainMake their raindrops kissesStraight from heaven aboveThat touch their hands and facesAnd that fill them with loveAnd make the moon reflect their smilesAnd their stars plentyAnd, above all, keep them togetherAnd hold them as you mayForever and everUntil their last day.
Laura Miller
I am digging the grave of love , skeleton not found till now , Just the rotten smell . R v sure it exists ?
Tushar Upreti
At night I sometimes see the figure of a man, on an empty road in a deserted landscape, walking behind a hearse. I am that man. It's you the hearse is taking away. I don't want to be there for your cremation; I don't want to be given an urn with your ashes in it. I hear the voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing, 'Die Welt ist leer, Ich will nicht leben mehr'* and I wake up. I check your breathing, my hand brushed over you. Neither of us wants to outlive the other. We've often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we'd like to spend it together."*The world is empty. I don't want to go on living.
André Gorz
You could probably call the whole thing an ordinary love story.
David Lagercrantz
I know we can do this. I know it’s nothow you would have chosen it, but I know I can make you happy. And all I can say is that you make me … you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy,even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.
Jojo Moyes
The secret to living fully is to find your passion and pursue it.
Ronald Louis Peterson
I know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.
Jojo Moyes
...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
Arthur Koestler
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air—that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. . . .In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen . . . I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.
H.L. Mencken
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
George Orwell
I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality.
Colin Woodard
We do not have to dig deep into history to understand the reality. The examples of Saddam Hussain, who was executed after a sham trial and the case of Muammar Gaddafi, who killed after surrendering in broad daylight, have given enough factual reality to understand the painful truth.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
What we can see in most societies is the gravity of suffering, tears of sorrow and nightmares of hopelessness.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Mr. President; give me back my country. Allow people to have their humanity. If you do not do this, history will never absolve you!
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Let us applaud the howls of the ignorant extremists as we stand on a knife-edge, not glad, but in acknowledgement of the bad, sad, mad gifts that the regime continue to offer us.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
We are not subjects of an autocratic King, but are citizens of the country contributing to the advancement of our people who pay taxes out of their hard earned income.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
We are citizens who love to fake life than dig deep into our reality to discover the truth and make amends and correct our own wrongdoings, because we are reluctant to learn from our past.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption of a fixed number of jobs in that system. Conversely, in arguing for collectivism, he always assumes that there will be as many jobs as there are workers. The government will make the jobs.
Isabel Paterson
There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss—the abyss from which there is no return.
James Bamford
The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.
Christopher Hitchens
By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.
Isaac Deutscher
They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.
Albert Camus
Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.
Jonathan Rauch
No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
Rose Wilder Lane
This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. There is no culture without legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works of the future may be, they will bear the same secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by the daring of thousands of artists of all times and all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that, even when confined to his calling, the artist is a public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny pays its respects, through the artist, to an image of man that nothing has ever been able to crush. My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: “Let us rejoice.
Albert Camus