Journalist Quotes

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

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

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

To the accountants, a true work of art is an investment that hangs on the wall.

Hilary Alexander

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?

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.

Stevenson's convictions were sometimes too complex for the binary political arena to which he devoted his life.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

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

Despite my professional experience, the fifteen-hour workdays, and a successful new show that I had helped build, MSNBC was still refusing to pay me what I was worth.

Mika Brzezinski

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

Bryan Appleyard

Any fool can make a quilt; and, after we had made a couple of dozen over twenty years ago, we quit the business with a conviction that nobody but a fool would spend so much time in cutting bits of dry goods into yet small bits and sewing them together again, just for the sake of making believe that they were busy at practical work.

Abigail Scott Duniway

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.

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)

My four Southern food groups are bourbon, salt, bacon and pie.

The infectious values and myths transmitted by bad sportswriters may be the deadliest words in the paper.

Well, Foley is responsible for it, and the voters in Florida, I guess, who elected him. Maybe they should have known better.

Among my notes I find something else that Kafka said about vegetarianism. He compared vegetarians with the early Christians, persecuted everywhere, everywhere laughed at, and frequenting dirty haunts. "What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people."

It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts. This explains the popularity of two enterprises: pornography and cafés.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's not about hair, it's about being you—whether that's something the industry has seen before and accepts or not.

A profile, a look, a voice, can capture a heart in no time at all.

None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom, or indifference over his inward joy.