Journalist Quotes

The cyborg is now the ideal to which all our most advanced technology is tending.

Bryan Appleyard

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

As opposed to the agenda from people like you to boost Sarah Palin, who is clearly unqualified.

You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded. A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell. People were beaten down. Everybody drank too much. Everything was hostile and dysfunctional. It was a good education about why the U.S. was a better place.

God puts mentors in your path. They may not look like you, sound like you, or be what you expect. But they always know more that you.

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

Isabella Beeton

I want to spend more time with my family, but I'm not sure they want to spend more time with me.

The Iowa caucuses are no more predictive than a gasbag on an ethanol high swaying from a bridge in Madison County.

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

One of the stock Sydney jokes is of the census-taker who enquires: 'How many children have you, ma'am?' 'Two living and three in Melbourne.'

I was looking for the authentic Negro experience, which of course my own wasn't, since being bourgeois somehow negated being black.

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.

Our sons and daughters are only passing through.... If we are lucky, they always will consider our home their harbor, but they are headed out to the open sea, almost from the first.

Jacquelyn Mitchard

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.

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.

Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it.

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

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.

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.

George Dangerfield

When did an old white guy yelling at me, telling me what to think become news? What gives him the right to tell me what to think? When was the last time he was in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sri Lanka... or anywhere that didn't have a beach?

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

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