Journalist Quotes

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.

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

Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.

Myra MacPherson

A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really?

Every writer I had ever known wrote his best work when he had his back up against the wall and thought he would never write another word.

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

Despite my professional experience, the fifteen-hour workdays, and a successful new show that I had helped build, MSNBC was still refusing to pay me what I was worth.

Mika Brzezinski

The anger. The terror. The feeling of entrapment. the profound distrust of people.The wistful, plaintive conviction that a window, a thing, was more important than she. These feelings and attitudes, expressed in the course of this hour, were symptoms of some profound disturbance.

Flora Rheta Schreiber

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

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

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

I have learned not to take too much notice of those who disapprove of my lifestyle choices, because I know that I was not designed to be part of the crowd. If I am different, I make no apology, and I hope that others will have the courage to be themselves and stand up for what they believe in, fight for those who need protection, love who they want to love, and be proud of it.

Life in a small town is like an intricately plotted novel, and even though I had read every book in the public library by the time I was fourteen, I found the real people around me saying and doing far more interesting things than did the imaginary book characters.

Maxine Cheshire

It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world.

Elizabeth Kolbert

Can anybody tell me why reporters, in making mention of lady speakers, always consider it to be necessary to report, fully and firstly, the dresses worn by them? When John Jones or Senator Rouser frees his mind in public, we are left in painful ignorance of the color and fit of his pants, coat, necktie and vest - and worse still, the shape of his boots. This seems to me a great omission.

The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Singing what's in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you'll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There's no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that's an option? You clearly aren't listening to enough Morrissey songs.

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

To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.

Brian Christian

You can cook when you're hungry or cook to make a living or to feel creative or even just as a distraction, but cooking for the people whom you wake up with and go to sleep with is the best thing ever

Never let me hear you say it's someone else's fault. It often is, but you must never shirk your own responsibility... You can't change others, but you can do something about a fault in yourself.

The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking.

Your lawyer is your true mercenary. Under his code honor consists in making the best possible fight in exchange for the biggest possible fee. He is frankly for sale to the highest bidder.

David Graham Phillips

What dance achieves, what play and sex achieve are the same thing that poetry achieves. They transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Jamake Highwater

Centuries of make-up that can be smudged by emotion have taught women to control their feelings.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte