quotes by Journalist Quotes

“Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.”

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

“What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

“Had I faltered we would have neither the success nor the international reputation we have. Yet when a woman is strong she is strident. If a man is strong, he's a good guy.”

“If one could only say just once: 'this is clear', all would be saved”

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”

“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”

“My words itch at your ears till you understand them”

“I was blown up while we were eating cheese.”

“The work for giants...to serve well the guns!”

“I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.”

“I have no wish to take life, not even human life”

“Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.”

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

“All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.”

“A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.”

“Please tell me what can I do. There must be something I can do”

“The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.”

“To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.”

“The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.”

“Both the President and Mr Gorbachev have said that they want to see a world without nuclear weapons. I cannot see a world without nuclear weapons. Let me be practical about it. The knowledge is there to make them. So do not go too hard for that pie in the sky because, while everyone would like to see it, I do not believe it is going to come about.”

“Only through suffering can we find ourselves.”

“There was the same dazzling red glare. The sea gasped for air with each shallow, stifled wave that broke on the sand. ...with every blade of light that flashed off the sand, from a bleached shell or a peice of broken glass, my jaws tightened. I walked for a long time.”

“Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”

“Philosophy studies the world, but the point is to change it.”

“Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.”

“I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.”

“In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.”

“As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.”

“The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.”

“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”

“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”

“There are no ugly cigars, only ugly smokers.”

“She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.”

“I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.”

“Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.”

“I think I'm going to have to get a flying license very soon, and maybe one of those Lear jets. It beats motorcycles all to hell.”

“If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.”

“Weeds are omnipresent; errors are to be found in the heart of the most lovable.”

“There is no greater glory than to die for love.”

“Who doesn't desire his fathers death?”

“The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.”

“La ve rite , comme la lumie' re, aveugle. Le mensonge, au contraire, est un beau cre puscule qui met chaque objet en valeur. Truth, like light, blinds. A lie, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight which shows the value of each object.”

“[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.”

“I might have preferred iron - but bronze will do. It won't rust. This time I hope, the head will stay on.”

“we left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. the night was muggy, and all around me i felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. whenever i thought of time in puerto rico, i was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes -- and if i watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three for four notches would startle me when it came.”

“The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.”

“At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.”

“You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.”

“I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.”