Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the sa...
There's no question that sources sometimes have interests aside from the truth when they talk to reporters. That's why reporters have to very aggressively report against their own theses and against their initial information.
Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.
Father Janovich: Why didn't you call the police? Walt Kowalski: Well you know, I prayed for them to come but nobody answered.
Walt Kowalski: [about Korea] We shot men, stabbed them with bayonets, chopped up 17 year olds with shovels.
Walt Kowalski: I used to stack fucks likes you five feet high in Korea... use ya for sand bags.
Mitch Kowalski: What would I want? Walt Kowalski: I don't know... Your wife's already gone through all of your mother's jewelry.
Allie: Did you write that? Duke: No, that was Walt Whitman. Allie: I think I knew him... Duke: I think you did too.
Well, the fact that the news industry doesn't have enough money to only send salaried staff to war zones means there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity for young people who want to be on staff and don't know how to get there.
I think it's more optimistic about human nature to acknowledge that people are the products of their time but then to see that they have moments of grace and dignity that everybody has.
It is human nature to be shortsighted and to lose momentum to make changes once the story is out of the headlines and there aren't financial incentives or political rewards. We owe to ourselves to learn from the past so we can try to do better.
Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can't imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head.
Letterman, despite whatever idiotic (or worse?) things he may have done with women on his staff, was wise enough to realize that silence isn't permanent and peace of mind can't be bought.
Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.
Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.
We may not have demon fathers dangling offers of infernal power before us, but everyone understands what it means to struggle with temptation or resist the urge to give in to our baser natures.
It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.
Everyone in the Chinese economic world knows that the country is not going to move out of cheap-workhouse status, toward the realm of 'real' rich-country corporate power and prosperity, unless (among other changes) it begins removing these price dist...
F.D.R. had to deal with Southern segregationists - and outright racists - who held power in Congress, so he had to yield to that power in order to get his New Deal legislation passed.
An object imbued with intent - it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it. An object devoid of intent - it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away.
