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

Science is like a flashlight; what it illuminates depends on where it is pointed.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Centuries of make-up that can be smudged by emotion have taught women to control their feelings.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

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

Hilary Alexander

I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness. But it's lucky I never ran. In the years from [Joseph] McCarthy to now, I would have either been destroyed or reduced.

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.

The first and most important impact of climate change on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a non-negotiable activity and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be reasonable about it.

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

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.

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

Charles Edward Montague

Elephants, it turns out, are surprisingly stealthy. As the sunlight fades, other species declare their presence. Throngs of zebras and wildebeests thunder by in the distance, trailing dust clouds. Cape buffalo snort and raise their horns and position themselves in front of their young. Giraffes stare over treetops, their huge brown eyes blinking, then lope away in seeming slow motion. But no elephants.

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.

In her inestimable audacity, Julia was the catalyst in my life for something beautiful. I hadn't anticipated her-hadn't even wanted her, truthfully-but there she was. A little something extra that made all the difference in the world.

Cathleen Falsani

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

Following directly behind the bier were the servants who would, in earlier times, have been slaughtered at the graveside, along with a warrior's horse. Musicians and torchbearers came next, with the rear taken up by the mimes- sinister, silent figures in wax masks modelled on dead members of the family.

Catharine Arnold

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

What makes the goal of accuracy so vexing for chatbots is that they operate probabilistically when choosing the next word in a sentence; they aren't trying to find the light of truth in a murky world.

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

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.

When we look up, it widens our horizons. we see what a little speck we are in the universe, so insignificant, and we all take ourselves so seriously, but in the sky, there are no boundaries. No differences of caste or religion or race.

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...

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

Zionist willingness to compromise met by Palestinian rejection and Jew hatred.