Journalist Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

When Callas carried a grudge, she planted it, nursed it, fostered it, watered it and watched it grow to sequoia size.

Harold C. Schonberg

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

How long can a coincidence extend before it ceases to be one? Does coincidence have to be momentary? How long is the moment, the ongoing moment?

If Darwin's theory should be true, it will not degrade man; it will simply raise the whole animal world into dignity, leaving man as far in advance as he is at present.

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

At this point, is the average person boarding a plane more fearful of Al Qaeda or TSA?

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

Intellectual freedom, of course, implies intellectual diversity.

Frances FitzGerald (journalist)

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

All enduring love between two people, however startling or unconventional, feels unalterable, predestined, compelling, and intrinsically normal to the couple immersed in it.

The sheer violence of it, the howl of air raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles carried its own political message; not just to President Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the superpower, those explosions said last night. This is how we do business.

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

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

Elizabeth Kolbert

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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.

It was a testament to the resilience of humanity. Give a man a tree and he will make it into a boat; give him a leaf and he will curve it into a cup and drink water from it; give him a rock and he will make a weapon to protect himself and his family. Give a man a small box and a limit of 140 characters to type into it, and he will adapt it to fight an oppressive dictatorship in the Middle East.

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

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.

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 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