The New York Times > Quotes

“...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....”
― New York Times

“[about Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises] His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions.”
― The New York Times

“wreck but Trot Nixon’s fair ball nestled in his glove.”
― The New York Times, Derek Jeter: Excellence and Elegance

“Perhaps Aristotle’s most widely-read work is his esoteric treatise on aesthetics, the Poetics. According to his analysis of tragic poetry (a section on comedy was either lost or never completed), the theatrical audience experiences katharsis (“purgation”) of the heightened emotions of pity and fear as the tragic hero, a basically good but flawed aristocrat, is brought down by his own “error of judgment.”
― The New York Times, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind

“Mr. Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.”
― The New York Times

“[On The Catcher in the Rye] “This Salinger, he’s a short story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it’s too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me. — James Stern”
― The New York Times

“The Concord public library committee deserve well of the public by their action in banishing Mark Twain’s new book, Huckleberry Finn, on the ground that it is trashy and vicious. It is time that this influential pseudonym should cease to carry into homes and libraries unworthy productions… The advertising samples of this book, which have disfigured the Century magazine, are enough to tell any reader how offensive the whole thing must be. They are no better in tone than the dime novels which flood the blood-and-thunder reading population… his literary skill is, of course, superior, but their moral level is low, and their perusal cannot be anything less than harmful”
― The New York Times

“Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education, and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned.”
― The New York Times, Class Matters

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is entertaining, bracingly honest and, yes, thought-provoking.”
― The New York Times Book Review

“It’s often said that an impoverished, poorly educated, agrarian country like China cannot sustain democracy. Yet my most powerful memory of that night 15 years ago is of the peasants who had come to Beijing to work as rickshaw drivers. During each lull in the firing, we could see the injured, caught in a no-man’s-land between us and the troops. We wanted to rescue them but didn’t have the guts. While most of us in the crowd cowered and sought cover, it was those uneducated rickshaw drivers who pedaled out directly toward the troops to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded. Some of the rickshaw drivers were shot, but the rest saved many, many lives that night, rushing the wounded to hospitals as tears streamed down their cheeks. It would be churlish to point out that such people are ill-prepared for democracy, when they risked their lives for it.”
― The New York Times, The Tiananmen Square Protests

“Things Fall Apart,”
― The New York Times, 'HAMILTON': THE HISTORY-MAKING MUSICAL

“Now, at thirty-four, she is back home. But her journey has transformed her so thoroughly that she no longer fits in easily. Her change in status has left Justice a little off balance, seeing the world from two vantage points at the same time: the one she grew up in and the one she occupies now.”
― The New York Times, Class Matters

“Henry Adams, who was quite possibly the best informed American of his time, reminds us continually that his prodigious education amounted to no education at all. “Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be ignorant. His course led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim.” To swim is to be in constant motion, taking the facts as we meet them, but always testing them against our own experience, until we arrive at something like the truth.”
― The New York Times, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind

“I hate everything unless I say otherwise,” Eric wrote. “Hey, don’t follow your dreams or goals or any of that, follow your animal instincts, if it moves kill it, if it doesn’t, burn it.”
― The New York Times, The Massacre at Columbine

“Good wombs have borne bad sons.”
― The New York Times, The Massacre at Columbine

“When the Shah of Persia was invited in London to go to the Derby, he replied, after pondering the proposition, "No. It is known to me that one horse runs faster than another.”
― New York Times

“Correction: July 4, 2019
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the foreign minister of Iran. It is Mohammad, not Mohammed.”
― New York Times

“Heart attack is a window on the effects of class on health. The risk factors—smoking, poor diet, inactivity, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and stress—are all more common among the less educated and less affluent, the same group that research has shown is less likely to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to get emergency room care, or to adhere to lifestyle changes after heart attacks.”
― The New York Times, Class Matters

“We cling to the egotistical notion that it is our economic and political dominance that drives terrorists insane.”
― The New York Times, The Massacre at Columbine

“The class a person is born into, she said, is the starting point on the continuum. “If your goal is to become, on a national scale, a very important person, you can’t start way back on the continuum, because you have too much to make up in one lifetime. You have to make up the distance you can in your lifetime so that your kids can then make up the distance in their lifetime.”
― The New York Times, Class Matters

“Colleges are becoming more conscious of their roles — too frequently neglected — in social mobility. They’re recognizing how many admissions measures favor students from affluent families.

They’re realizing that many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions.”
― New York Times

“While working-class parents usually teach their children, early on, to do what they are told without argument and to manage their own free time, middle-class parents tend to play an active role in shaping their children’s activities, seeking out extracurricular activities to build their talents, and encouraging them to speak up and even to negotiate with authority figures.”
― The New York Times, Class Matters

“Marriages that cross class boundaries may not present as obvious a set of challenges as those that cross the lines of race or nationality. But in a quiet way, people who marry across class lines are also moving outside their comfort zones, into the uncharted territory of partners with a different level of wealth and education, and often, a different set of assumptions about things like manners, food, child-rearing, gift-giving, and how to spend vacations.”
― The New York Times, Class Matters

“Mr. Jobs’s next big thing is buttressed by mounting evidence of a post-PC era in which silicon, not software, will be king. That is likely to bring wrenching changes in the technology world, largely dominated by Microsoft for the last decade. Under Microsoft’s hegemony, hardware became a low-cost commodity. Now it may be software’s turn.”
― The New York Times, The Rise of Apple

“One of the presidential campaigns unveiled more of an infrastructure in place for the next contest than was previously thought to be present, with a spokesperson saying that one of the campaign's strengths is that it does not make an effort to draw attention to with every asset.”
― New York Times The

“The tradition of Western literature flows from two primary sources: Homer and the Bible.”
― The New York Times, The New York Times Presents Smarter by Sunday: 52 Weekends of Essential Knowledge for the Curious Mind

“Few ideas, however, have had the impact of the printing press itself. Perhaps only written language—starting as a few scratches on a cave wall—has offered as great a power to expand the human mind.”
― The New York Times, The New York Times Presents Smarter by Sunday: 52 Weekends of Essential Knowledge for the Curious Mind

“You can't bottle wish fulfillment but Nora Roberts certainly knows how to put it on the page.”
― The New York Times

“A New Comics Publisher Aims to Shake Things Up”
― The New York Times

“You cannot kill satire.”
― New York Times The