20th-century Journalist Quotes

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

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

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

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

Scott Simon
Scott Simon
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.

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

Michael Levine
Michael Levine
It was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn't actually exist at all.

The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic.

Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn
I had no idea how Stevenson's cases would hold up under close scrutiny. But given what was at stake - nothing less than possible concrete evidence of life after death - weren't they at least worth a visit?

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

Earl Wilson
Earl Wilson
The country of the aged is a land few people think very hard and seriously about before the time of life when they sense that they're arriving there. Somehow, throughout much of life, being old seems to be something that happens to other people.

Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

John Lanchester
John Lanchester
That's what art is: escaping everyday normality, which wants to eat you alive.

In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies. In a Russian comedy, everybody dies, too. But they die happy.

To reform the House of Lords [in 1910] meant to set down in writing a Constitution which for centuries had remained happily unwritten, to conjure a great ghost into the narrow and corruptible flesh of a code.

I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of 'living a lie'. I came to believe that other people - even when you think you know them well - are ultimately unknowable.

I don't want to be quoted, and don't quote me that I don't want to be quoted.

The Devil himself had probably redesigned Hell in the light of information he had gained from observing airport layouts.

To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

James Risen
James Risen
If your lawyers tell you that you have a very good case, you should settle immediately.

Liberals and conservatives disagree over what are the most important sins. For conservatives, the sins that matter are personal irresponsibility, the flight from family life, sexual permissiveness, the failure of individuals to work hard. For liberals, the gravest sins are intolerance, a lack of generosity toward the needy, narrow-mindedness toward social and racial minorities.

E. J. Dionne
E. J. Dionne
Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it.