journalists-from-kentucky

"The Holy Roman Catholic Church offers to the oppressed Negro a material as well as a spiritual refuge. We need the Church, the Church wants us. Investigate brethren!"

"Soldier: You guys aught to do a story on me suntahm. Herr: Why should we do a story about you? Soldier: 'Cause I'm so fuckin' good, 'n' that ain' no shit, neither. Got me one hunnert 'n' fifty-se'en gooks kilt. 'N' fifty caribou. Them're all certified."

"Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there."

"War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway."

"I think that Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods."

"Black sergeant: You a reporter? Herr: No, a writer. Black sergeant: Careful. You can't use no eraser up where you wanna go."

"Mal Hombre: God damn it, Sergeant. I thought you were a professional soldier. Sergeant: I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, and I was gonna lose my man. Mal Hombre: This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant? Sergeant: Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper 'dirty laundry'?"

"There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years."

"The splendor of Silence,—of snow-jeweled hills and of ice."

"The way of the Wind is a strange, wild way."

"Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson feast The clan came tramping in."

"And that was a million years ago In a time that no man knows; Yet here tonight in the mellow light We sit at Delmonico's. Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is dark as jet, Your years are few, your life is new, Your soul untried, and yet —"

"Our love is old, our lives are old, And death shall come amain; Should it come today, what man may say We shall not live again?"

"God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds And furnished them wings to fly; We sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn, And I know that it shall not die, Though cities have sprung above the graves Where the crook–bone men made war And the ox–wain creaks o'er the buried caves Where the mummied mammoths are."

"For we know the clod, by the grace of God Will quicken with voice and breath; And we know that Love, with gentle hand Will beckon from death to death."

"Then as we linger at luncheon here O'er many a dainty dish, Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a tadpole and I was a fish."

"To weld the theory of soul-transmigration to the reality of evolution was an inspiration that, coming to Langdon Smith in the midst of a busy life, nevertheless sung itself into his heart with a wealth of poetic meaning and suggestion that found its ultimate expression in verses which so securely link his name with those whom no passing moment can plunge into obscurity. … The crowning glory of "Evolution" is, perhaps, the manner in which he interwove throughout his masterpiece of imagination a golden thread of romance that becomes more and more lustrous as the story unfolds. He linked inseparably physical life and spiritual life, the so-called vital and eternal sparks, as, into the web of the lives that evolve, he wove the woof of love and brought them down through the ages as one."

"Ten seconds into the century, the first issue of the New York Journal of 1 January 1901 fell from the newspaper’s complex of fourteen high-speed presses. The first issue was rushed by automobile across pavements slippery with mud and rain to a waiting express train, reserved especially for the occasion. The newspaper was folded into an engraved silver case and carried aboard by Langdon Smith, a young reporter known for his vivid prose style. At speeds that reached eighty miles an hour, the special train raced through the darkness to Washington, D.C., and Smith’s rendezvous with the president, William McKinley. … the Journal exulted: A banner headline spilled across the front page of the 2 January 1901 issue, asserting the Journal's distinction of having published "the first Twentieth Century newspaper. . . in this country," and that the first issue had been delivered at considerable expense and effort directly to McKinley."

"I carved that fight on a reindeer bone With rude and hairy hand; I pictured his fall on the cavern wall That men might understand. For we lived by blood and the right of might Ere human laws were drawn, And the age of sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone."

"When you were a tadpole and I was a fish In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you even then."

"Mindless we lived and mindless we loved And mindless at last we died; And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift We slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot lands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the womb of death And crept into light again."

"Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a life to come."

"Yet happy we lived and happy we loved, And happy we died once more; Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold Of a Neocomian shore. The eons came and the eons fled And the sleep that wrapped us fast Was riven away in a newer day And the night of death was past."

"And, oh! what beautiful years were these When our hearts clung each to each; When life was filled and our senses thrilled In the first faint dawn of speech."

"Thus life by life and love by love We passed through the cycles strange, And breath by breath and death by death We followed the chain of change. Till there came a time in the law of life When o’er the nursing sod, The shadows broke and soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God."

"I was thewed like an Auroch bull And tusked like the great cave bear; And you, my sweet, from head to feet Were gowned in your glorious hair."

"I flaked a flint to a cutting edge And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland lank And fitted it, head and haft."

"Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, Where the mammoth came to drink; Through brawn and bone I drave the stone And slew him upon the brink."

"Having said that, I don't want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program — the alleged program — the existence of which I can neither confirm nor deny."

"Why doesn't Senator Kerry, rather than saying, I meant to put in the word, "us" — and you try to put in "us" here, left out the word "us" — and if you don't — if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq. Where does "us" fit in? You don't "us" get stuck? I don't understand. It just — it doesn't scan here."

"What Senator Kerry ought to do first is apologize to the troops. The clear implication here is if you flunk out, if you don't study hard, if you don't do your homework, if you don't make an effort to be smart and you don't do well, you "get stuck in Iraq." But an extraordinary thing has happened since September 11th, which is a lot of people — America's finest — have willingly agreed to volunteer their services in a mission that they know is dangerous, but is also important. And Senator Kerry not only owes an apology to those who are serving, but also to the families of those who have given their lives in this."

"Look, I hate to tell you, but it's not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill and there have been other scandals as you know that have been more than simply naughty e-mails."

"Reporter: Wait a minute. You said yourself, correctly, that both Bush 41 and Clinton had talks with Hafez al-Hassad — Snow: Which were blazingly pointless."

"Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view."

"Okay, we will divide the first [of two questions] and let the second die a crib death."

"One of the problems with NPR is that there is so much political correctness that if you've got a name that looks like it was made up by Rudyard Kipling, you've got a better chance of getting hired. I'm a white guy named Tony Snow, for heaven's sake. That's as white as it goes."

"If we could get them back to the '67 borders it certainly would be a triumph, but they're not about to move anywhere. They keep taking and keep bulldozing homes on the West Bank. They have Jewish-only roads. They would never tolerate that here...My view is that you should not create another nation in somebody else's country, and the Palestinians were 85 percent in the majority, until they began the immigration for the Jews and for the Zionists because they had designated Jerusalem as their home, that God gave it to them. Well, I mean, that's— what God? Who? And so forth. Everything like that is just very debatable. Jews have been persecuted all over the world. There's no question about that. Certainly the Nazis—. I mean, it's too horrifying to think of what they did and the silence in the world when it was happening. At the same time, they aren't the only ones who fought in World War II. I had— my brothers, two brothers, were there. All my relatives. Every American was involved. So it isn't a question of the Holocaust was a simple thing going on. The Russians lost 25 million people."

"Not a secret. It’s very open."

"I don't have to answer questions from Helen Thomas."

"The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that's what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy. But now the 201-year-old Executive Mansion belongs only to a select, elitist group of people, including top government officials, members of Congress and the press corps. They and some others, all of whom are screened in advance, are welcome. But most people are not — not anymore."

"I don't want to beat an old horse, but it's a bit unfair to compare Helen Thomas to Hezbollah. Clearly, Helen only endorses religious cleansing; she doesn't openly support genocide."

"For several decades, Helen Thomas covered the White House as a reporter for United Press International.... and when the specter of war grew large in 2002, she didn’t hold back. "It’s bombs away for Iraq and on our civil liberties if Bush and his cronies get their way," Thomas said... during a speech at MIT. Looking back on a long career, she said: "I censored myself for fifty years when I was a reporter.""

"Helen Thomas, who I used to consider a close friend and who I used to respect, has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot."

"We were never hyphenated as Arab-Americans. We were American, and I have always rejected the hyphen and I believe all assimilated immigrants should not be designated ethnically. Or separated, of course, by race, or creed either. These are trends that ever try to divide us as a people."

"At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up... My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? …"

"All presidents rail against the press. It goes with the turf."

"This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history."

"I don't speechify. I know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that's what I ask. But they get mad at the straight line. I just want to ask a tough question."

"[I]t took a lot of chutzpah on the part of a lot of newspaper women who came here in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties to break down the barriers against women reporters. And we couldn’t even become members of the National Press Corps until 1971 — that’s pretty late in the game. We got the vote, which we should’ve been born with, in 1920. Everything we’ve had to struggle for — it’s ridiculous."

"We've got to break through the wall of secrecy. It's America's fate."