Top 303 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Reporters - Page 2

Our vices are the excesses of our virtues.

The proportionality of what has happened to America because of unemployment and housing makes everything else look like a flea on a dog's ass.

At first sin was as fragile as a spiders thread, and finally as stout as a ship's hawser; sin arrived as a passerby, next lingered for a moment, then came as a visitor, and finally became master of the house.

Trump's - has great negatives, enormous negatives, a lot of people say they simply won't vote for him. So if he's gotten media, maybe it hasn't done him so much good.

It used to be that we taxed property - zapped farmers basically. And there were very rich people who didn't pay that much tax. So in 1913, they put in the income tax. It was incredibly popular. The tax we love to hate today.

We should listen to the voice of conscience. It does not take nearly as much courage as one might think to admit to our mistakes and learn from them. Human beings are in this world to learn and to change themselves in learning.

We have a pope [Francis] who's very popular among the Catholic faithful and non-Catholics, but there's no doubt he's going to continue to face resistance from conservatives inside the church.

Sometimes instinct can be wrong. But sometimes it can be right too. And sometimes you just have to take it on faith.

The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored.

[Pope Francis] lashed out against what he called malevolent resistance to his reforms.

Being the “best you can be” is really only possible when you are deeply connected to another. Splendid isolation is for planets, not people.

Well, at this point, it looks like the Iraqi forces are moving into the city center itself. Now they've been working on this for seven months now. The American military's been pushing them and encouraging them to really get into the city and rout ISIS. So now they're finally doing it.

Our tax code becomes so absurdly complex every 32 years that we have no choice but to scrap it and re-write. The 32-year period is up in 2018. So the time has come. History tells us that we're going to produce a fairer, simpler tax code by 2018.

Marriage. Don't be pressured into it. Is the fear of loneliness really greater than the fear of bondage?

[Donald Trump] has also promised an intelligence surge [in Syria]. Mike Flynn knows a lot about that. Tactically, Mike Flynn has been fantastic with intelligence when he was in the military. They'll be looking at that.

I cant pretend to be objective when it comes to service or sacrifice.

If the experts are right in their calculations, then we face the prospect of millions of people retiring into poverty from the American middle class in the years ahead. That has all kinds of social and economic consequences. We need to anticipate those and start tackling the problem in a constructive way.

Nigerian nun Bernadette Duru says the African church hierarchy is indifferent to people in rural areas.

The most invigorating form of reading matter is, of course, a will.

You [can] become part of someone else's narrative. Every once in a while I would get people asking me questions like, "If your husband is a Muslim, then why haven't you converted to Islam?" Interestingly enough, almost every person who asked me that was a Sunni, and it was their not-so-subtle way of implying that my Shiite husband was a bad Muslim for letting his infidel wife run around unconverted.

[Paul] Ryan won kudos both within his membership and the party base for not giving in.

It's usually much easier for people with professional skills to find work for themselves or even possibly to continue with their old employer, but on a part-time basis. Some labor economists predict that in about five years there will be a labor shortage in the United States and that demand for retirees to work part-time will grow naturally. I don't know if that's true or just wishful predicting.

And what exactly is nature walking? It's any and every kind of walking you can do in the natural world. The activity encompasses strolling, striding, sauntering, stepping, treading, tramping, traipsing, traversing, rambling, roving, roaming, racewalking, hiking, meandering, wandering, wending, pacing, peregrinating, perambulating ... in natural surroundings.

My workday is non-stop break-neck high stakes and high pressure. Every day.

I thought Donald Trump approach on Brexit was a fascinating window into how he thinks. His basic point was that [David] Cameron should resign because he didn't read the public mood on the issue right. And that Boris Johnson should be the next prime minister because he did. That's a very different definition of leadership than many politicians have. Or at least say they have.

At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when the population was two per square world.

The suggestion that Jews were selected from among all nations of the earth to be God's chosen people suggested a kind of group arrogance, especially when the good news was first reported by Jews. However, the choice was interpreted not as tribute to superior virtue but as divine challenge.

Right, because they're looking at also organizing the Sunni tribes up around Mosul to take back that city as well. That's the second largest city in Iraq. That's going to be a very, very tough fight. And the Shia militias were not used in Ramadi, and we're told by the Iraqi generals that they don't want any Shia militias up in Mosul, either, to take back that city. So - but again, that's going to be a very, very tough fight.

France, they're the world champion at soaking the rich on taxes. And at one point, they had what they called a hyper tax, 75 percent, and Gérard Depardieu and many others left the country.

Pedro Teixeira, the great Portuguese merchant-adventurer, wrote a beautiful description of a coffeehouse with windows overlooking the Tigris and the ruins of old Baghdad. That was in 1604, and he's visiting the same street that I write about in the book, named after Abu Nuwas, though it wasn't called that back then.

In the Bible, fate was often presented as the handmaiden of morality: sin was succeeded by misfortune, righteousness by prosperity, with reward and punishment instrumental in persuading man to obey divine commandments.

In the Middle East, bread is so essential to everyday life that word for it in Egyptian Arabic is aish, which means life. It's always been the staple grain. But the predicament is that the Fertile Crescent, where wheat cultivation began, has now become the part of the world most dependent on imported wheat.

The Value-Added Tax, a sales tax that applies at every level of business transactions, is an easy tax for governments to collect, and a hard tax to evade. So it makes the job of raising revenue easier. The revenues from the VAT can then be used to lower taxes on income and saving and investment. The Value-Added tax doesn't penalize work or saving; it's a tax on buying stuff.

In other words, governments do not collect taxes to provide services, they provide services as an excuse to collect taxes.

Ironically, the people who do not need Israel are gradually taking over Israel, and they're actually pushing out people who so need it.

If you get rid of all these giveaways and loopholes and deductions and credits, then you can sharply lower the rates.

The retirement financial crisis will affect far more people than baby boomers, and certainly it will affect their children. Most of the retirees and near-retirees with whom we talked, said that they were extremely reluctant to have to depend on their children financially, or to think of moving in with their children. But the mere fact that they were discussing those issues indicates that some of them have already figured out that that is what lies ahead for them.

Where do architects and designers get their ideas? The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

Of course, with the last ads shipped and the last polls conducted, there'??s not much to do but try to read the tea leaves. And from what Democrats are seeing, it doesn't look good. At all.

If elected, Hillary Clinton will be the least popular president to be elected in modern history. So there's going to be very little incentive on the part of Republicans to work with her.

In Jewish tradition, death-defying devotion to scholarship was the stuff of saintliness.

What indicates a person’s weak religion and fear of God, is that he seeks for an opinion that suits his desire.

Mortgage is one of the most popular deductions. It costs the Treasury about $103 billion a year. Now that's money we could use to treat wounded veterans or reduce the deficit or fill the border. Instead, we give it a subsidy to homeowners, and it goes mainly to the richest homeowners in America, because only one third of Americans itemize their deductions. It doesn't work. Many countries have gotten rid of the mortgage interest deduction. Almost all of them have higher homeownership rates than we do.

I will stay in the car until the last minute that I'm going to jump out and do a standup or jump out and do some interviews.

There's a tradeoff. Yeah, I lose the deduction that I really like, but my tax rate is going to go down, and I don't have to fill out that form anymore. It's much simpler, rates are lower, and that tradeoff has worked in many countries. Many countries have just cleaned house of all those exemptions in order to provide lower rates, and people buy it.

Americans are curious about the texture of everyday life in the Middle East because they rarely get to see it. I wanted readers to feel like they were sitting around the dinner table with me and my friends, hearing what average people really say and really think, [where] the dinner table is the best place to find out.

The most common mistakes were investing in money market funds by people who were so scared at the prospect of managing their own funds that they picked the most conservative option, and their investments did not keep up with inflation. The second major mistake was being too heavily invested in their own company's stock, and buying when it was high and there was a lot of optimism about the company, and then having to sell it low when the company got in trouble.

People roll their eyes at the idea of Kanye West running for president. I do not.

The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but for places from Africa to Afghanistan. There are millions of stories out there, millions of potential Booksellers of Kabul or Valentino Achak Dengs.

Truthfulness is composed of justice and courage.

We must remain human, even in the most difficult times … Because, despite everything, there must always be humanity within us. We have to bring it to others.

There are two things that if you do them you will attain the good of this world and the hereafter; [They are] that you bear what you dislike if it is beloved to Allah and you leave what you like if it is disliked by Allah.

The U.N. is asking Italy to oversee this effort. And if a government is formed, you're likely to see up to 5,000 Italian troops maybe go in to provide security and also train a Libyan army.

A [Jewish] woman could not divorce her husband, but she could petition for divorce, and the religious courts could force him to grant the divorce on grounds of impotence, denial of conjugal rights, or unreasonable restriction of her freedom-for example, preventing her from attending funerals or wedding parties.

As you see, context is everything and nothing at the same time. Words stand alone and with each other.

Social Security is the foundation stone of that kind of retirement security. It not only needs to be strengthened in order to make sure it's there for younger baby boomers and Generations X and Y, but it probably needs to be strengthened and expanded because the retirement benefits now being offered by most employers are not sufficient to support middle-income Americans in their long years of retirement.

I do think that even if the average person doesn't care, it IS a big deal. Like, it's been a foundational principle of our democracy for 240 years.

Anyone who has a simplistic idea about the Middle East, or about the conflict, doesn't get it - because there are no simple answers. And anyone who is messianic, in a right-wing way or a left-wing way, is wrong too. The way forward is a kind of cautious, commonsense approach - a cautious, humble hope. No fantasies.

The children of baby boomers should take very seriously the consequences for them of the inadequate funding for them of the baby boomer generation. This is a huge economic problem for the nation, not just for individuals or individual families. Think about it for a minute - if retirees become 20% of our population and their purchasing power falls below what has been normal for retirees in the past, one important engine driving our economy will be diminished.