Journalist Quotes

Today I arrived by train in New York City, which I'd never seen before, walked through the grandeur of Grand Central Terminal, stepped outside, got my first look at the city and instantly fell in love with it. Silently, inside myself, I yelled: I should have been born here!

Edward Robb Ellis

When we give our minds and our responsibility away, we give our lives away. If enough of us do it, we give the world away and that is precisely what we have been doing throughout known human history. This is why the few have always controlled the masses.

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

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.

Each child's story is worthy of telling. There shouldn't be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.

Anderson Cooper

I didn't drive eleven hours across the state of Texas to watch my cholesterol.

If nature and earth, those kindliest of mother-goddesses, were so aroused as to annihilate cities, men could only conclude that the fault was theirs.

Hermann Schreiber

All you have to do is anesthetize the masses by telling them they're an elite, that they've got a mission, that they're making history, that they're fulfilling their destiny and fighting for a better world — and they swallow it like lambs — even when a guttersnipe says it.

Hans Hellmut Kirst

In the part of the night where it's quietest, around three or four o'clock, I started wondering where this black man's soul had disappeared to as it left his body. His thoughts, impressions, memories, whatever: the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from forgetting we're alive. It had to go somewhere: it couldn't just vaporize—it must have gushed, trickled or dripped onto some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark.

In Manhasset you were either Yankees or Mets, rich or poor, sober or drunk...You were 'Gaelic' or 'garlic," as one schoolmate told me, and I couldn't admit, to him or myself, that I had both Irish and Italian ancestors.

J. R. Moehringer

If you find yourself despairing about the state of our great country, just think about how unlikely it would have seemed, back in the malaise days of 1979, that Jimmy Carter would one day return to Washington via Reagan Airport.

Salmon have strange ideas. They are afraid of parsley and slices of lemon.

Many of the Huichols and North American peyotists claim that when one eats peyote, one is "tasting oneself: if the user is pure, this cactus is "sweet." Barbara Myerhoff, accompanying the Huichols during their 1965 and 1966 hunts, recorded that they urge new participants to "Chew it well. It is sweet, like tortillas.

[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.

All the food we eat - every grain of rice and kernel of corn - has been genetically modified. None of it was here before mankind learned to cultivate crops. The question isn't whether our food has been modified, but how.

Michael Specter

The bourgeois never included the ownership of capital as one of the social restraints that should be abolished, for the simple reason that it was not to him a restraint at all. It never therefore entered his head to regard it as such, and he saw nothing inconsistent in calling for the abolition of privilege, monopoly, and so forth, while hanging on to his capital.

Christopher Caudwell

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.

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.

Enron was becoming a virtual cult of creativity, often placing swagger over substance. New ideas were celebrated for their newness, for their potential; tried and true businesses like the pipelines were almost derided.

Kurt Eichenwald

Texans are the only race of people known to anthropologists who do not depend on breeding for propagation. Like princes and lords, they can be made by breath; plus a big hat-which comparatively few Texans wear.

Following directly behind the bier were the servants who would, in earlier times, have been slaughtered at the graveside, along with a warrior's horse. Musicians and torchbearers came next, with the rear taken up by the mimes- sinister, silent figures in wax masks modelled on dead members of the family.

Catharine Arnold

A molecule is a messy thing. It has a gangling skeleton whose bones are chemical bonds and whose joints are its component atoms.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

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

Take assertiveness training, get paid what you're worth, join a consciousness raising group.

The infectious values and myths transmitted by bad sportswriters may be the deadliest words in the paper.