Women Journalists From The United States

"No oath of office or obligation of duty demands that a particular political party be supported, preserved, defended, protected, and adhered to — because no political party defines what an American is."

"Perhaps [Condoleezza Rice] would have made a more timely cameo in New Orleans had a Chevron tanker caught fire. Jane Crow seems to be just as willing as old Jim was."

"I say we pardon the turkeys, but not our elected officials."

"If you consider, for example, that democracy is much like a religion then 9/11 is akin to finding the body of God."

"Our duty - as citizens - to the Constitution transcends every other point of disagreement that every person and/or every group of people can have with one another, no matter how deeply felt. Watching our entire country implode under the self-serving ideologies of those so eager to claim everything but the Constitution as their guide leaves at least half of us without a home. We may live on the same land, but our nation and the citizens of that nation have been exiled into a national wilderness."

"Stop any person on the street and they will tell you their own version of what it means to be an American, perhaps accurately, but mostly not. Some might say that being an American means wearing the US flag as a lapel pin. Others might say that in order to be defined as an American, one must attend the right church and be the right type of Christian. Still others will tell you that supporting the troops and, above that even, supporting the President is what makes one American. Some might even venture that being born in this country or of parents who are citizens of this country is surely enough. On this last point there is some truth, but only in terms of rights, not responsibilities. As such, it presents only half of the equation."

"Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy."

"If man was devolving into a psychotic pit of rotted plasma, [Karl] Rove would be the Alpha of such grime."

"We have no leadership, no captain at the helm as it were. We are, in effect, being led from disaster to disaster by a headless horseman run amok with stuffed pockets and an empty conscience."

"Many have defined the neocon movement based on the highly intellectual, albeit warped, musings of Strauss and Bloom. Yet one could hardly call the current leadership intellectual or even capable of digesting this philosophy. Even neocon thinkers are jumping off the ship. Do you believe this is simply trickle-down Machiavellianism in much the same way that Communism trickled down as an aberration of its original intent?"

"In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood and guts news, TV 40 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide."

"She had written something like 'TV 40 news personality Christine Chubbuck shot herself in a live broadcast this morning on a Channel 40 talk program. She was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she remains in critical condition."

"I would spend a nickel on the subway and go arbitrarily to some other stop and look around there. So I was roaming the city in the afternoons and applying for jobs in the morning. And one day I found myself in a neighborhood I just liked so much…it was one of those times I had put a nickel in and just invested something. And where did I get out? I just liked the sound of the name: Christopher Street — so I got out at Christopher Street, and I was enchanted with this neighborhood, and walked around it all afternoon and then I rushed back to Brooklyn. And I said, "Betty I found out where we have to live.""

"Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses."

"Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances."

"Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best — most responsibly and responsively — when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money."

"One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education."

"To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder."

"Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities."

"While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble."

"Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture."

"The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?"

"This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book. The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past."

"As for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings."

"A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution."

"It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so."

"Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers."

"The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe. Extremists typically want to squash not only those who disagree with them diametrically, but those who disagree with them at all. It seems to me that in every country where extremists of the left have gotten sufficiently in the saddle to squash the extremists of the right, they have ridden on to squash the center or terrorize it also. And the same goes for extremists of the right. I do not want that to happen in our country."

"We must demonstrate that it is possible to overcome poverty, misery and decay by democratic means, and we must ourselves believe, and must show others, that our American tradition of the dignity and liberty of the individual is not a luxury for easy times but is the basic source of the strength and security of a successful society."

"I was taught that the American's right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant. I was made to feel that it would be a disgrace to me, as an individual, if I should not value or should give up rights that were dearly bought. I am grateful for that upbringing."

"I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas."

"I did have an inkling that I was going to be a writer. That was my intention."

"Jacobs has never been political in the sense of supporting one ideology or party over another. Larger ideologies, she firmly believed then and continues to believe, only obscure the realities, which are to be found by looking around, paying attention, and trusting your eyes over what people are merely saying. In that spirit, she always supported the right of labor unions and grass roots movements to exist. "I think it is good for us to have vociferous political minorities and to know how to live with them," she wrote. But her personal support of any individual cause was always based on her absolutely unbending principles."

"Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconservatives in Canada."

"I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically."

"Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole"

"Redundancy is expensive but indispensable."

"In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details."

"The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway."

"Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men."

"Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife."

"When your house is burning down, you don't worry about the remodeling."

"Isn't it really, really offensive that our president is simply not telling us the truth about what's happening in Iraq? For me, that was one of the most offensive things about the entire convention. There was no truth-telling there. It was all a complete masquerade. Both about Iraq and about the domestic economy... The problem is not that the people think the Democratic Party is not sufficiently hawkish; it's the problem that they are not sufficiently bold and sufficiently visionary. They need to go back to Bobby Kennedy and 1968. That was the last time that a Democrat truly inspired red states and blue states and everybody and the millions of people out there."

"Don't forget: our media culture failed to serve the public interest by missing (with a few honourable exceptions) the two biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the Iraq war and the financial melt­down. We've had far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies."

"Two years after launching The Huffington Post I was exhausted, burnt out. The feeling many of us have. I collapsed from exhaustion and on the way down I hit my head on the desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. And it started me on this journey of questioning what success is"

"By conventional definition of success, which means two metrics: money and power, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, I was not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of my office"

"We need a third metric of success, which include our health and our being, first of all, because if we sacrifice that, what do we have? And our capacity to tap into our own wisdom, our own sense of wonder at the beauty of life that we so often miss, and our capacity to give, and to be kind"

"I’m asking people to realize that whatever our job in the world is, whatever our dreams are, we are bigger than that. If we can find that, who we really are and live from that place, life is truly amazing no matter what the challenges and the obstacles are"

"My mother would constantly say to me: ‘Don’t miss the moment’, because really that is all we have. And so often our minds take us to the future, either worrying about the future or judging our past"

"I started life so self-judgmental. I call the voice in my head the ‘obnoxious roommate’; always putting me down, telling me I’m not good enough. And learning to actually deal with that voice, with a sense of humor – maybe getting it to dance with you – in order to evict it from my head. Then we are much more present"