Journalist Quotes

There is no sports event like Opening Day of baseball, the sense of beating back the forces of darkness and the National Football League.

But that perhaps is the point of any memoir—to walk with the dead and yet see them with our eyes, from our vantage point.

Margaret Forster

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.

The way botanists divide up flowers reminds me of the way Africa was divided into countries by politicians.

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

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.

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.

I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness. But it's lucky I never ran. In the years from [Joseph] McCarthy to now, I would have either been destroyed or reduced.

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

Isabella Beeton

There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast

Paul Scott Mowrer

In every state and nearly every civilized nation in the developed world, readers know where to go for action and reaction of news – at least one day ahead... Free from any corporate concerns, there are simply too many to thank since the site's inception in 1994. This new attempt at the old American experiment of full freedom in reporting is ever exciting. Those in power have everything to lose by individuals who march to their own rules.

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

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

On the book The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:

The whole plot, from beginning to end, is basically implausible – at any rate to anyone who has any real knowledge of the business.

A person cannot grow up through happiness. Happiness makes a person shallow. It is only through suffering that we grow up, transform, and come to a better understanding of life.

Leslie T. Chang

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.

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

John Sandford (novelist)

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.

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

Jamake Highwater

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 young physician is not aware how soon his elementary knowledge — much of which is historical and descriptive, rather than philosophical — will fade from his mind, when he ceases to study. That which he possesses can only be retained by new additions.

The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human was given its first chance to become truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made 'knowledge and understanding' the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and sensible society of human beings.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers.

Irving Bacheller

Like the 75 billion souls who lived before him, each and every one a treasure, he, too, will die.

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

Elizabeth Kolbert