Quote

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

Ellen Goodman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Getting
Firsts
First
Right
Always
Goodman
Tension
Journalism

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

Image
We may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished the life he'd earned.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.
Ellen Goodman
Image
The great myth of our work-intense era is 'quality time.' We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.
Ellen Goodman
Image
You can believe in women's rights without believing that every woman is right.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.
Ellen Goodman
Image
We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?
Ellen Goodman
Image
The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I vote because it's what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?
Ellen Goodman
Image
instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
Ellen Goodman
Image
What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.
Ellen Goodman
Image
In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?
Ellen Goodman
Image
Without even knowing it, we are assaulted by a high note of urgency all the time. We end up pacing ourselves to the city rhythm whether or not it's our own. In time we even grow hard of hearing to the rest of the world. Like a violinist stuck next to the timpani, we may lose the ability to hear our own instrument.
Ellen Goodman