Commentary Quotes

“The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them.”
― Rachel Maddow

“And pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.”
― Jane Austen

“Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”
― Arthur Miller

“Tore up from the floor up. Followed by a big outtie.

John Mathew”
― J.R. Ward, Lover Mine

“When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, “Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.” I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”

It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong—unless you steal nectarines.

And if you protest against this view you are usually met with chatter about the legitimacy and beauty and sanctity of “sex” and accused of harboring some Puritan prejudice against it as something disreputable or shameful. I deny the charge. Foam-born Venus … golden Aphrodite … Our Lady of Cyprus… I never breathed a word against you. If I object to boys who steal my nectarines, must I be supposed to disapprove of nectarines in general? Or even of boys in general? It might, you know, be stealing that I disapproved of.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

“Yet censure strikes hard at women, while men, the true agents of trouble, hear no reproach.”
― Euripides, Electra

“The club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the centre of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else.
You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The constant steaming in of thoughts of others must suppress and confine our own and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought… The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui ( latin for vacuum suction )from the poverty of their own mind , which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others… It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves… When we read, another person thinks for us; merely repeat his mental process. So it comes about that if anybody spends almost the whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking. Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge and very little experience , the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Comments are free but facts are sacred.”
― C.P. Scott

“If a man tells you that he is fond of the Imitation, view him with sudden suspicion; he is either a dabbler or a Saint.”
― Ronald A. Knox

“Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“She turned quickly to face him, and with one part of his mind he thought, They call it falling in love, admiring as always the wisdom of the language. Not stumbling in love, not walking, striding, jumping, bouncing, crawling in love. You fall in love, straight forward like a chopped tree, straight down like a rock from a cliff: gravity, earth, concussion.”
― Max Byrd, Jackson

“Always support younger writers, and do all you can to nourish that spirit of creativity, and original risk. The unique manner of literary innovation that younger writers may engage in, ultimately is priceless. Writers, poets and authors are the spokespersons for ours and the next generations. Support them, mentor them, protect them from the viciousness of popular opinion, which is generally nothing more than censorship wearing the cloak of righteous indignation.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy

“Yardy doing a good job out there—1-14 off his five overs so far—but Bangla are letting this drift. The bowling is there to attack, but they're as passive as sleeping sloths at the mo.”
― Tom Fordyce

“Photographers sometimes take pictures of each other; occasionally they take pictures of each other at work; more usually they take photographs - or versions - of each other's work. Consciously or not they are constantly in dialogue with their contemporaries and predecessors.”
― Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment

“Young people today seem to be positively pickled in gin.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Hangman's Holiday: A Collection of Short Mysteries

“Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
― C. P. Scott

“By my faith,' said Wamba, 'it would seem the Templars love the Jews' inheritance better than they do their company.”
― Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

“John does not say 'the sins'... But he says, 'the sin of the world,' as if the whole mass of human transgression was bound together, in one black and awful bundle, and laid upon the unshrinking shoulders of this better Atlas who can bear it all, and bear it all away. Your sin, and mine, and every man's, they were all laid upon Jesus Christ.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions Of Holy Scripture St. John Chapters I To Xiv

“The book is quite serious and quite funny. (Most novels are.)”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Live your life by GOD’S PRINCIPLES, not someone’s opinion or commentary.”
― Brenda Diann Johnson

“Although the full implications of the COVID-19 pandemic remain to be seen, it is already clear that domestic and international politics will – and must – change to prevent an even deeper disaster. We are entering a brave new world in which "big government" and international solidarity are both unavoidable.”
― Joschka Fischer

“Reversibility, like that of day and night, of all the concepts at the equatorial heart of the system: this paradoxical, derisory, indefensible and therefore impregnable position is the bitter privilege of phantom rhetorics.

As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveller is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.

Theory must not only be cut off from its reference, but also from any commentary: it's not normal to carry out an autopsy on a newborn child.

Is not the world itself, once it is removed from the nightmare of objectivity perpetrated by science - the intention of which was to pay it impartial homage - an effect without a cause? And thus also without consequence. There is no sense, then, in musing on its failure.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“A more realistic understanding [of the value of commentary] is that individual consumers engage in consumption as a social process, deriving psychic benefits from being part of a community with an intersubjectively shared reality.”
― Mukti Khaire, Culture and Commerce: The Value of Entrepreneurship in Creative Industries

“If there is a certain sincerity and ethics in a dissociated life lived with self-awareness, it is because hypocrisy and deception dwell in the falsely coherent life.”
― Tamaki Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl

“The Next Go-To Spot. The tender brisket, with a crust as perfect as praline candy, will make you want to brave the rush-hour traffic just to sample it. The sauces are smooth as silk and layered with infusions of spice. Rather than being an afterthought, the sides deserve a life of their own. Margot Salton is a sorceress, wielding her unique mastery over wood and smoke and fire.
“Wow,” Margot said. “That’s a damn love letter. Thanks, sugarman74.”
― Susan Wiggs, Sugar and Salt

“In my experience,...the humans who talk most loudly about freedom are the ones who think it’s so good that nobody else should have any of it.”
― Karen Traviss, Halo: Mortal Dictata

“Yes, everything begins in the human heart. But the human heart is not vacuum-packed. The pulsebeat from any breast, however armored, is felt, not just in private contract-"doomed commitments"- between private persons, but in Selma, in Haight-Ashbury, in Vietnam, in South Africa, in East New York. Reports from those locations are also reports from the heart.”
― Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Off Center: Essays