Journalist Quotes

One danger, when you're writing lots of quick, opinionated blog items about the latest developments, is that you never get around to stating fully, in one place, what you think about a particular topic.

My father was not a political animal.

My father was an immigrant from Austria and he became a lawyer and became a judge and I think he was a good judge.

If Americans are reluctant to go on the dole that's because they have a healthy work ethic.

I've often been accused of spending more time and energy criticizing my fellow Democrats than criticizing Republicans.

I'm not anti-immigration.

I'm not a Wall Street expert, but I can read the papers.

I'm fortunate to make any money as a blogger.

I may have been the only candidate in America who failed to ride the wave of anti-establishment anger to victory.

I know I have the mental capacity of a thousand bloggers, but because of that, my obligation to serve God is also that of a thousand bloggers.

I don't have any particular beef with Barbara Boxer. My beef is with the official Democratic doctrine that anybody who reaches Boxer's position has to spout and has to endorse.

Ezra Klein gets under my skin. He seems to spout the party line.

Do we really want a society in which the stigma of going on the dole has been erased?

An ignorant person with a bad character is like an unarmed robber, but a learned person with a blog is a robber fully armed.

The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.

The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.

Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world.

People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.

Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve.

My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.

Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers - there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians.

In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

In order to feel contempt, you generally need to cherish some kind of feelings.

In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this.

I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing.

I'll tell you what colonial experience is.

I remember that during the period leading up to independence in Angola in 1975, I was the only correspondent there at all for three months.

I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another.

Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve.