20th-century Journalist Quotes

If I'm a young black man in South Central L. A., where poverty is rampant and unemployment is skyrocketing, I see that Washington's promises of a year ago have gone unfulfilled, I see that perhaps for a second time, the court's inability to mete out justice in a blind fashion, why shouldn't I vent my anger?

I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule. Clarence Birdseye

The most I can hope for is to die in a pose that confuses future archaeologists.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw

In the dusk of a lane I met a shepherd with his sheep. A small dog with the expression of a professor of mathematics does all the work.

Henry Vollam Morton

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Dealing with people, my friends, is really nothing more than a question of the price that one is willing to pay. The better you understand life, the more capital you build.

Gregor von Rezzori

Great. First the anonymous call. Now letters. Body parts all over town. It was like a scavenger hunt for psychos. Running after clues with a half-deranged, serial-killer-obsessed, recovering-addict cop was not a good idea. Then again...

Several times in my life I've gone through long periods without sex or any other kind of physical contact. The hunger it produces is deep and low; it's possible to lose track of it, to forget or fail to perceive how it's emptied everything out of you and made the world papery and thin. Touch starved, you brush against existence like a stick against dry leaves. You become insubstantial yourself, a hungry ghost.

What You Lose on the Swings You Make Up on the Merry-Go-Round,

George V. Higgins

When astronomers express dissatisfaction with both the Big Bang and the Steady State concepts of the universe, they are in trouble, because it is hard to imagine radical alternatives.

Psychologist Philip Tetlock (following the lead of Isaiah Berlin), divided the world of political forecasters into hedgehogs and foxes.

Many things I might not write today because I no longer believe them, but I wouldn't change them, since I believed them at the time.

I don't make mistakes. I make prophecies that immediately turn out to be wrong.

I do not believe — and I have never believed — that the crack cocaine explosion was a conscious CIA conspiracy, or anybody's conspiracy, to decimate black America. I've never believed that South Central Los Angeles was targeted by the U.S. government to become the crack capitol of the world. But that isn't to say that the CIA's hands or the U.S. government's hands are clean in this matter. Actually, far from it. After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S. government's responsibility for the drug problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.

If the colonists hadn't rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn't exist.

In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.

Wilfred Burchett

And have no doubt, the real purpose of the Earth Summit is to transfer your hard-earned cash to others who mostly have governments with even less of a clue how to conduct their affairs than we do.

By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings — Gyges' ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news.'

Most flaws couldn't be hidden at the last minute. A restaurant couldn't reinvent its menu or find a new purveyor of better ingredients just because a critic showed up. I got undercooked fish and overcooked pasta in places that knew full well I was there.

If you have even a smidgen of doubt that you'll be able to stay away from racking up additional debt, don't do it.

The foundation of humility is truth. The humble man sees himself as he is. If his depreciation of himself were untrue,... it wouldnot be praiseworthy, and would be a form of hypocrisy, which is one of the evils of Pride. The man who is falsely humble, we know from our own experience, is one who is falsely proud.

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both.

Alexandra Fuller

And the Third World will continue to beckon to the First, reminding it of the Galilean vision of Christian solidarity.

Fundamentalists are less concerned to be systematic and rational than to be humble and faithful, accepting God's commandments because they come from God, not because they proceed from common sense or sophisticated reason.

Appearances are there to be ignored, for the biggest hearts may reside in the smallest and unlikeliest of creatures. Those who fail to look beyond the surface will never encounter true virtue - not in others and certainly not in themselves.