Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A friend is someone who knows where all your bodies are buried. Because they're the ones who helped you put them there." And sometimes, if you're really lucky, they help you dig them back up.
The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior holds that under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damn well pleases.
Given that Mr. Kerry is clearly exaggerating what happened to minority voters in the 2000 election in Florida, maybe we should wait for him to provide evidence of what he is alleging in 2004.
Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
The best type of government comes from a government that is scrutinized by the people when they have true information about our governments, major corporations, other power actors in society.
We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.
I have no time for the endless nostalgia: 'Oh gosh I used to . . . ' Life is too short; I don't have any time for sitting and saying I miss things. What's the point? Go and do something else.
There's a particularly British wariness of appearing to try too hard. It's somehow distasteful. Everything should come to us seamlessly and, if you have to work at it, you're somehow a loser.
It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.
Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing.... And never take advice, including this.
Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.
When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.
The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.
Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.
On his own okay, Bush has authorized eavesdropping on as many as a thousand people over the past three years, with some of those intercepts being purely domestic, the New York Times reported.
Girls have a tendency to take responsibility for romantic misinterpretations, when often it's men whose perfectly honed emotional inscrutability makes life more complicated than it should be.
I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguays dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.
Of all the threats to free speech in history, the one the media give the most credibility to without question is the feminist movement, which is trying to rebrand public debate as harassment.
We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we've treated the Arab world as just an oil field.
Our actions in the Middle East over the last 15 years have already guaranteed radical Muslims quite enough ammunition to kill Americans for the next century, even if Guantanamo did not exist.
Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.
The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him.
We do not understand these Americans who, like adolescents, always speak of sex, and who, like adolescents, all of a sudden have discovered that sex is good not only for procreating children.
I was born in 1935. But my mother and father - who were immigrants from Ireland - and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.
For months, Republican Party leaders have been talking about the need to unify the GOP, in part because of Donald Trump and his criticism of the establishment, which created such big divides.
We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play.
Since the Cuban Revolution and since the invasion of Santo Domingo a state of emergency has existed in Latin America. The Marines shoot at anything that moves, regardless of partyaffiliation.
The U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11. I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it.
The real problem is that we use too much oil. It's that simple and that difficult. If we truly want to reduce our vulnerability to high prices, the best way to do so is to reduce consumption.
Hardly anyone liked R.E.M. who didn't like them way too much, so part of being an R.E.M. fan meant getting wildly overinvested and then feeling vaguely disappointed by whatever they did next.
If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.
I love books that rhyme. And I love books that are clever and have little lines in them that are meant to amuse the parents who will no doubt be reading the book over and over and over again.
The comfort zone is always the most desirable place to be. But in settling for comfort, there is a price to pay and it comes in the death of ambition, of hope, of youth and the death of self.
I had almost nothing published until I had something published in Sports Illustrated. I started there as a fact-checker two weeks after I got out of college and was there for almost 20 years.
Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.
I saw Chungking for the first time more than 40 years ago - a city of hills and mists, of grays and lavenders, two rivers shaping it to a point and the cliff rising above me like a challenge.
Once people get a taste for whatever you want to call it - economic independence, a better lifestyle, and a better life for their children - they grab on to that and don't want to give it up.
TV journalism is a much more collaborative, horizontal business than print reporting. It has to be, because of the logistics. Anchors are wholly dependent on producers to do all the hustling.
All the stuff I love most in game storytelling is never the big-picture stuff; it's the stuff that feels like curlicues, stuff that's just there because it's a game and because you can do it.
We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.
You convey something that the public either trusts or it does not trust, and it has to do with the content and how you handle the news, but it also just has something to do with your persona.
I shifted my career when I was 44 to quit the Washington beats. I had a great Washington beat, a series of them, and I quit to start my tech column, which was a different kind of tech column.
An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.
'Playboy' operated with a patina of civility that granted the average man a presumption of pleasure that went one way - his. And that permission flourished in the psyches of all kinds of men.
A profound political question is suddenly on the table: Must the country continue to give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values?
Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral.
If you see something, say something. This is more than a slogan. If you see someone turning toward violence, say something. Say something to law enforcement or to one of you in your community.
Dictatorships do cut down on rape, and pillage, not to mention sexual harassment, by the simple expedient of sending people to labour camps for life or cutting off their hands without a trial.