Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People are starting to know more about it, but I was blown away by Almaty, Kazakhstan. It's like a future Swiss Alps. It has the potential to be an extraordinary ski resort. It is a city with beautiful mountain scapes.
The best thing going for us is Al Gore. I cannot conceive how the American people could elect him. On the other hand, I couldn't conceive how they could elect a Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton - especially Clinton in '96.
If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing?
I don't have any [specific] intelligence about a Vice-Disney deal, but I do know that everybody's nervous about these emerging players, who can come in and have enough attractive, original content to take market share.
I violated, apparently, an unspoken rule that we are supposed to take care of our own. Frankly, if that invites discomfort, I welcome it. I don't think there's enough discomfort in journalism, especially in Washington.
For 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way.
Marx and Engels are arguably history's most famous couple. Such was the closeness of their collaboration that it is not always easy to recall which works bore both names, which just that of Marx, and which just Engels.
Mostly, I think of myself as having great common sense. I've always been proud of that. Was I a terrific student? Absolutely not. But put me in a roomful of people, and I don't think I'm ever going to embarrass myself.
My most embarrassing moment was when I was a student at Tufts University and decided to go 'streaking' with a group of girls in the middle of January. Somehow I lost them and ended up being chased by the campus police.
A state department official once told me this about the role of the president. He said: "We wage war for realist reasons, we justify wars for idealist reasons, and it's the president's job to balance the two." I agree.
I absolutely tore George W. Bush to shreds, despite the fact I knew the guy personally and I actually campaigned for him in 2000. It's our job to just call it like we see it whether these people are our friends or not.
Generally I get up at around 7. But oftentimes, I'll be lolling in bed a little bit earlier - sometimes as early as 5:45 - filing in my mind all the things I have to get done. Which is, of course, totally unproductive.
I hardly expected the grand jury to sustain me, after they saw everything different from what it had been while I was there. Yet they did, and their report to the court advises all the changes made that I had proposed.
As a print journalist, if you hear a rumour you try to stand it up and if you can't, the story dies. With a blog you can throw the rumour out there and ask for help. You can say: 'We don't know if this is true or not.'
Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than to be younger? It's not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you're constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.
Nothing like mashed potatoes when you're feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin, cold slice of butter to every forkful.
Laura Bush has the face of my mother when my mother was young. The face, the body, the voice. The first time I saw on TV Laura Bush, I got frozen because it was as if my mother was not dead. 'Oh, Mama,' I said, 'Mama.'
I very much wanted to live in Paris when I was in the army, and I was quite determined to. I could have become a dress designer: Dior was willing to take me on as an assistant, but he did not have an immediate vacancy.
The United States is a concept that works very well, even in bad times. But that's no reason to think its structure can be superimposed with success on any other part of the world, particularly when times are terrible.
Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support.
We say we want politicians who are open and honest. And then, when we get one, we angrily pelt him with slime until he cringes to the mob, starts hiding his real views, and hires a spin doctor just like all the others.
Is anyone serious about the politics of happiness? David Cameron dipped a toe in the water, using the word lightly, but denying the hard policies it implies. Labour shies away from it, but should take up the challenge.
The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves.
The restaurant chefs in Spain are breaking ground, but in terms of the everyday cooking in Spain I still hear people coming back and saying they were disappointed. I think it's because they're expecting the chef stuff.
I found it really astonishing that undocumented migrants were kidnapped so routinely, that it was such a commonplace part of the journey for people trying to reach the US, and that we hear almost nothing about it here.
We are on a sexual binge in this country. ... One consequence of this binge is that while people now get into bed more readily and a lot more naturally than they once did, what happens there often seems less important.
Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It's just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it's also an affirmation of faith in their country.
Friendship- my definition- is built on two things. Respect and trust. Both elements have to be there. And it has to be mutual. You can have respect for someone, but if you don't have trust, the friendship will crumble.
History is reticent about women who were common soldiers, who bore arms, belonged to regiments, and took part in battles on the same terms as men, though hardly a war has been waged without women soldiers in the ranks.
One of the strangest unintended consequences of abortion, of legalized abortion, was that it drives the crime rate down because what abortion really was, was a mechanism for which fewer unwanted children could be born.
My first interview at SI, I sat in silence next to Guy LaFleur for five minutes on the New York Rangers team bus until he finally broke the ice. Those early interviews, every one of them was like a terrible first date.
But what is significant is that if you don't want to like and accept somebody, one excuse is as good as another. The objective facts don't matter, and the reasons are never as ‘reasonable' as we like to think they are.
I'm used to promoting books, but a movie is a very different thing. You have to go to film festivals and wear fancy clothes and try and look glamorous and intelligent when you're just terrified and you want to go home!
Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power; whether he is trapped by responsibility or made free by it; whether he is moved by other people and outer forces or moves them - this is of the essence of leadership.
Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.
I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.
Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.
What I'm worried about is that, in case that happens [nuclear explosion], then the Iranian people are the ones who are going to pay the heaviest price. But none of the Western countries have seriously talked about this.
IMPALE, v.t. In popular usage, to pierce with any weapon which remains fixed in the wound . . . . properly, to put to death by thrusting an upright sharp stake into the body, the victim being left in a sitting position.
LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.
The crisis of Western values has many aspects, many faces. There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects.
I remember also speaking to a reporter on Gay News who enquired about my attitude to Gay Dogs and reassuring him of my compassionate attitude to homosexuality among dogs, while secretly feeling they ought to be whipped.
We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else.
Privacy is relational. It depends on the audience. You don't want your employer to know you're job hunting. You don't spill all about your love life to your mom or your kids. You don't tell trade secrets to your rivals.
One-third of all professional baseball players come from Latin America, and Sosa is following role models such as the late Roberto Clemente, a Puerto Rican, from whom he adopted the No. 21. Now he is a model for others.
My daddy never really lived before he died, He could never count on justice or know a free man’s pride, And now it’s almost certain that I, too, will be denied, I’ve got to make things better for my son and for my tribe
Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.
Without question the AK-47 was a remarkable invention, and not just because it works so well, or because it changed how wars are fought, or because it proved to be one of the most important products of the 20th century.
I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.
The White House is dismissing these fiery town halls as the result of professional protesters. Well, that`s exactly how President [Barack] Obama team`s and Democrats dismissed the 2009 town halls and Tea Party protests.