Quotes

Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this: Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.

Mortimer Adler

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Woody Allen

Remember that on any world the wind eventually wears away the stone, because the stone can only crumble; the wind can change.

A.C. Crispin

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.

Peter Drucker

Quoting someone and rewriting their words makes it a quote from you and not them any longer. To change the meaning of someone’s words without permission is offensive enough, to then contact the quoted person and try to justify it to them is even worse. It’s verbatim or bust!

Stewart Stafford

That’s how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must’ve got left out.

Tim Tharp, Knights of the Hill Country

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done.

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

George Orwell

The only way in which a durable peace can be created is by world-wide restoration of economic activity and international trade.

James Forrestal, First United States Secretary of Defense – 1947-49

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

Noam Chomsky

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Life is like underwear. Change is good.

Author Unknown

From Nieman Lab:

Newsrooms, social scientists, public health professionals, and librarians unite

“We’ll see more attacks on public institutions — libraries, universities, school boards, news organizations. They’ll be hard to parse and hard to think about as connected.”

Melody Kramer

. . . .

Audience development roles broaden further

“We’ll mitigate the risks of our often uneasy relationships with Facebook, Google, and Apple by further doubling down on diversifying our audience sources and cultivating direct relationships with readers.”

Sarah Marshall

. . . .

Audience engagement ≠ community engagement

“Newsrooms won’t find the key to any of this in their analytics.”

Ariel Zirulnick

. . . .

We remember the importance of face-to-face reporting

“It might let you glimpse that almost imperceptible frown on your source’s face when you ask a question.”

Alice Antheaume

Link to the rest at Nieman Lab

A bend in the road is not the end of the road…unless you fail to make the turn.

Helen Keller

Change is the end result of all true learning.

Leo Buscaglia

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

Samuel Butler

For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.

Arthur C. Clarke

You are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

 Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

Virginia Woolf

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

A little second person by Mahatma Gandhi

It’s hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.

Lisa Randall

The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.

Peter Drucker

Be grateful in your own hearts. That suffices. Thanksgiving has wings, and flies to its right destination.

Victor Hugo

Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.

William Arthur Ward

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: It must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

William Faulkner

Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Voltaire

Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Charles Dickens

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.

John Wooden

There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.

Ambrose Bierce

Holy men tell us life is a mystery.
They embrace that concept happily.
But some mysteries bite and bark
and come to get you in the dark.

Dean Koontz

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

Richard Wright

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Richard Wright, Black Boy

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Richard Wright, Native Son

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her.

Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.

Shannon L. Alder

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

T.S. Eliot

All literature is gossip.

Truman Capote

This is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and the spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned on his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature, and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.

Mark Twain, Autobiography 1892

Among the four old bridges that span the river, the Ponte Vecchio, that bridge which is covered with the shops of Jewellers and Goldsmiths, is a most enchanting feature in the scene. The space of one house, in the centre, being left open, the view beyond, is shown as in a frame; and that precious glimpse of sky, and water, and rich buildings, shining so quietly among the huddled roofs and gables on the bridge, is exquisite.

Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy 1846

I do not regard the procuring of peace as a matter in which we should play the role of arbiter between different opinions…more that of an honest broker who really wants to press the business forward.

Otto von Bismarck

In my first publication I might have claimed that I had come to the conclusion, as a result of serious study of the literature and deep thought, that valuable antibacterial substances were made by moulds and that I set out to investigate the problem. That would have been untrue and I preferred to tell the truth that penicillin started as a chance observation. My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist. My publication in 1929 was the starting-point of the work of others who developed penicillin especially in the chemical field.

Sir Alexander Fleming

But nothing of a nature foreign to the duties of my profession [clergyman] engaged my attention while I was at Leeds so much as the, prosecution of my experiments relating to electricity, and especially the doctrine of air. The last I was led into a consequence of inhabiting a house adjoining to a public brewery, where first amused myself with making experiments on fixed air [carbon dioxide] which found ready made in the process of fermentation. When I removed from that house, I was under the necessity making the fixed air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have distinctly and faithfully noted in my various publications on the subject, I by degrees contrived a convenient apparatus for the purpose, but of the cheapest kind. When I began these experiments I knew very little of chemistry, and had in a manner no idea on the subject before I attended a course of chymical lectures delivered in the Academy at Warrington by Dr. Turner of Liverpool. But I have often thought that upon the whole, this circumstance was no disadvantage to me; as in this situation I was led to devise an apparatus and processes of my own, adapted to my peculiar views. Whereas, if I had been previously accustomed to the usual chemical processes, I should not have so easily thought of any other; and without new modes of operation I should hardly have discovered anything materially new.

Joseph Priestley

A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.

Martin H. Fischer

A drug is a substance which, if injected into a rabbit, produces a paper.

Otto Loew

(1) I have told you more than I know about osteoporosis.

(2) What I have told you is subject to change without notice.

(3) I hope I raised more questions than I have given answers.

(4) In any case, as usual, a lot more work is necessary.

Fuller Albright

That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.

Truman Capote

Farming is a matter of dirt and dung. It is not the kind of thing we look to to find the meaning of human life. It is too ordinary, too inescapably a part of life to be interesting. We know that it has to be done, but see no reason to pay much attention to it. But it is just because farming is inescapably a part of human life that it may provide a clue to what is most basically human, and so a clue to our place within the cosmos.

Stephanie Nelson