Journalist Quotes

Any solution to a problem changes the problem

A man has only a limited number of ways in which he can express strong emotions or violent passions. He uses the same gestures as when what he feels is only petty and unimportant. He utters the same ordinary words.

Tadeusz Borowski

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

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?

It is for us to discharge the high duties that devolve on us, and carry our race onward. To be no better, no wiser, no greater than the past is to be little and foolish and bad; it is to misapply noble means, to sacrifice glorious opportunities for the performance of sublime deeds, to become cumberers of the ground.

William Lloyd Garrison

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

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

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

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.

These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.

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

If you are to love mankind, you must not expect too much from it.

Charles Edward Montague

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

Nicholas A. Basbanes

If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!

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

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

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

If you find yourself despairing about the state of our great country, just think about how unlikely it would have seemed, back in the malaise days of 1979, that Jimmy Carter would one day return to Washington via Reagan Airport.

[On Senator Jesse Helms] I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind, because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Isabella Beeton

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

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.