20th-century Journalist Quotes

Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth about the sexual revolution is that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm in the life of women.

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy.

Douglas Edwards

Science and religion were apples and oranges. So the pact said: render unto apples the things that are Caesar's, and unto oranges the things that are God's. Just as the Maya kept two calendars, one profane and one priestly, so Western science and religion fell into two different conceptions of the universe, two different vocabularies.

Believe me, those great death bed speeches are written ahead of time.

Whatever the individual motives of censors may be, censorship is a form of social control.

Carey McWilliams

Just as the apparent openness of rectitude will have its hidden places where foul things moulder in the dark, so, in the shadowed lives of those outside the law may sometimes be found concealed honesty and naive ideals.

William McIlvanney

Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.

Myra MacPherson

The Greatest Generation got to save old tires, dig a Victory Garden and forgo sugar. The Richest Generation is being asked to shop.

Margaret Carlson

Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-today struggles of working people.

The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to terms with the lives and thoughts of strangers.

Simon Winchester

Let's face it, there are no plain women on television.

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

Life may not be fair, but when you have someone to believe in, life can be managed, and sometimes, even miraculous.

I think there's a lot of coloured players in all the major teams and there are lots of coloured players who are probably the best in the Premier League. If you look at 25 or 30 years ago it was probably in a bad way – not as bad as some of the other nations on the Continent – but certainly there is always, always room for improvement.

We spend a good part of our lives trying desperately to convince ourselves as well as everybody else that we know more than we really do.

Seek happiness and you may or may not find it; seek grievances and you are guaranteed success.

Gregg Easterbrook

I'm that grumpy old guy yelling at all those pesky little Grizzly Bear fans to get offa my lawn.

Parents can plant magic in a child's mind through certain words spoken with some thrilling quality of voice, some uplift of the heart and spirit.

Stevenson's convictions were sometimes too complex for the binary political arena to which he devoted his life.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

My four Southern food groups are bourbon, salt, bacon and pie.

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

Referring to the reunification of Germany:

It's like the Beatles coming together again—let's hope they don't go on a world tour.

In a liberal scientific society, to claim that you are above error is the height of irresponsibility.

Hollywood has its Oscars. Television has its Emmys. Broadway has its Tonys. And advertising has its Clios. And its Andys, Addys, Effies and Obies. And 117 other assorted awards. And those are just the big ones.