American Journalist Quotes

People always died in the most hidden places. They'd bleed to death, I guess. By the time their bodies were brought in, they're bloated, and they'd dig out the identification tags on some corpse's chest, maggots all over the place. And those aren't scenes which you want to report to your people back home. I mean, everybody would think it was their own son. I didn't have his name.

I get letters from people who say, 'What have you got against women?' What could I possibly have against women? I've married three of them.

And each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the picture might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future - causing them caution and remembrance and realization.

W. Eugene Smith

No man can feel himself alone
The while he bravely stands
Between the best friends ever known
His two good, honest hands.

One of the problems with NPR is that there is so much political correctness that if you've got a name that looks like it was made up by Rudyard Kipling, you've got a better chance of getting hired. I'm a white guy named Tony Snow, for heaven's sake. That's as white as it goes.

The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.

On broadcast journalism:

You can shine a light in a dark corner and make life better for people living there in the dark.

It appears to me that our sex is only discussed publicly in a derogatory manner. The respectable woman is doomed to anonymity.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich.... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

Prejudice, the floating wreckage of chattel slavery, rises ever to the surface of the turbulent waters of a Nation's life, obstructing each best attempt toward a safe course to its highest citizenship.

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks

Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been... It goes beyond academic degrees, specialized training or book learning, because all the theory in the world means nothing if you can't read the street.

Although they are unfailingly gracious, evangelicals are not so good at respecting professional boundaries.

I don't particularly like South Korean literature.

Brian Reynolds Myers

We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.

The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended.

Theodore Dreiser

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 can't be yourself with a man, you can't be with that man.

What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite, ego strength, meaning (among other things) ordinary, Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.

Churches come and go, but there has ever been but one religion. The only religion is conscience in action.

Henry Demarest Lloyd

It's not the nineteenth century; I'm not meant to be judged on how good a housekeeper I am. Getting down on the floor with a lemon and a bucket of vinegar does not make me a better person.

The image of a searching man held by Einstein and by Isaac Newton two hundred years before him is of a being wading in the shallows of the ocean of physical reality — trying to fathom the entirety by sampling only a part.

Did I choose you? Did you choose me? And what difference does it make? All that really matters, friend, is that we chose together.

The best way to get thrown out of the columnists' club is to be uncertain about anything whatsoever on this earth.

Any chief executive who hires a consultant to give them strategy should be fired.

Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently.