Journalist Quotes

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

We've always had great letter writers, readers, great storytellers in our family. I've listened all my life to articulate people. They were all great storytellers, and every story had shape and meaning and point.

Katherine Anne Porter

Since the primary object of the scientific theory is to express the harmonies which are found to exist in nature, we see at once that these theories must have an aesthetic value. The measure of the success of a scientific theory is, in fact, a measure of its aesthetic value, since it is a measure of the extent to which it has introduced harmony in what was before chaos.

J. W. N. Sullivan

English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.

Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.

To the accountants, a true work of art is an investment that hangs on the wall.

Hilary Alexander

Every man is his own Pygmalion, and spends his life fashioning himself. And in fashioning himself, for good or ill, he fashions the human race and its future.

I gave my life for freedom—This I know:
For those who bade me fight had told me so.

William Norman Ewer

The generals who had called Zia a mullah behind his back felt ashamed at having underestimated him: not only was he a mullah, he was a mullah whose understanding of religion didn't go beyond parroting what he had heard from the next mullah. A mullah without a beard, a mullah in a four-star general's uniform, a mullah with the instincts of a corrupt tax inspector.

It is for us to discharge the high duties that devolve on us, and carry our race onward. To be no better, no wiser, no greater than the past is to be little and foolish and bad; it is to misapply noble means, to sacrifice glorious opportunities for the performance of sublime deeds, to become cumberers of the ground.

William Lloyd Garrison

One is always seeking the touchstone that will dissolve one's deficiencies as a person and as a craftsman. And one is always bumping up against the fact that there is none except hard work, concentration, and continued application.

It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers--men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton--have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times--a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime.

As a journalist, my job is to be dispassionate. Suddenly to be the centre of a story and to be crying, it made me feel very insecure.

Natasha Kaplinsky

Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely.

Isabella Beeton

Well, Foley is responsible for it, and the voters in Florida, I guess, who elected him. Maybe they should have known better.

[On Senator Jesse Helms] I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind, because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will.

Charles Haughey was undoubtedly a great statesman... By far the most gifted politician of his generation,
he squandered his opportunities for greatness on luxuriant rhetoric and luxurious living.

According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting. The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer. That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life.

The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.

Even when Muslims do something intolerable, Europeans have to tolerate it in atonement of past colonial and imperialist misdeeds. Victimhood is an inexhaustible capital that Muslims in Europe could dig into for generations. The fact that the killers of Charlie Hebdo staff had never even visited Algeria did not deprive them of their ancestral capital of victimhood because of French colonial presence there decades before the two killers were born in Paris. Even acts that are clearly not worthy of respect, such as female genital mutilation, must be respected in the name of cultural otherness.

Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.

The truth is, the notion that gay marriage is harmful to marriage, is sort of mind-boggling, because these are people trying to get married. But it seems to me, if you want to defend marriage against something, defend it against divorce.

In the mud of the Cambrian main Did our earliest ancestor dive: From a shapeless albuminous grain We mortals our being derive. He could split himself up into five, Or roll himself round like a ball; For the fittest will always survive, While the weakliest go to the wall.

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

Perhaps the greatest good that will emerge from this Far Eastern crisis is an awareness that freedom-loving men of all races and all nations will have proved that they can and must work and fight together if their freedom is to survive.