Journalist Quotes

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

Any solution to a problem changes the problem

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

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

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

Whenever life gets to be too much for me, I have a hard time keeping my eyes open. Sleeping is cheaper and safer than drinking. It keeps you from saying or doing things you'll regret later, and though you may have nightmares, you won't wake up with a hangover. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

Great. First the anonymous call. Now letters. Body parts all over town. It was like a scavenger hunt for psychos. Running after clues with a half-deranged, serial-killer-obsessed, recovering-addict cop was not a good idea. Then again...

He must summon his people to be with him—yet stand above, not squat beside them. He must question his own wisdom and judgment but not too severely. He must hear the opinion and heed the powers of others—but not too abjectly. He must be aggressive without being contentious, decisive without being arrogant, and compassionate without being confused.

Emmet John Hughes

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

Elizabeth Kolbert

The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is 6 to 5 against.

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

With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character.

Nicholas A. Basbanes

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

I gave my life for freedom—This I know:
For those who bade me fight had told me so.

William Norman Ewer

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.

Hell was not part of the original creation. Hell is God's fall-back position. Hell is something God was forced to make because people chose to rebel against him and turn against what was best for them and the purpose for which they were created.