Journalist Quotes

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

He had by now divested himself of schoolboy attitudes. He was unburdened by the desire to be a martyr or a hero. Any thoughts in that direction, Belgica effectively had quashed. Heroism in the corrupt sense of the age almost by definition, meant wanton self-sacrifice and bungling. For neither had he any taste. He wanted rational attainment; victory, but not at any price. No point upon the globe was worth the cost of a single life.

Roland Huntford

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.

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?

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

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.

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

It is Astronomy that reveals to us the Universe in its majestic whole; it is she who has made us comprehend its structure, and after having gathered its thousand various elements into a gorgeous picture, has initiated us into the eternal laws that govern the Heavens.

Amédée Guillemin

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

All you ever want to do is remind me that I am black. But goddamn it, I also am.

John A. Williams

Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life. It is the universal predicament. It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes. Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities, the strength, the wisdom, the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen as appropriate for your special endowments.

Charlton Ogburn

It is, I reckon, difficult to conceive of a single area of government policy that is at once so important for each of us, so catastrophically complicated, so insanely unjust, so obscenely ineffective, and has been quite so comprehensively cocked up by successive administratations as the British pension system.

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

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.

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.

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.

The cyborg is now the ideal to which all our most advanced technology is tending.

Bryan Appleyard

It appears to me that our sex is only discussed publicly in a derogatory manner. The respectable woman is doomed to anonymity.

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.

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

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

Harold C. Schonberg

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

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

As a journalist, my job is to be dispassionate. Suddenly to be the centre of a story and to be crying, it made me feel very insecure.

Natasha Kaplinsky

We Latin women are liberated from the neck up, not the neck down.

Cristina Saralegui