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

Ellen Goodman

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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

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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.
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My father used to say that if a man fools you once, he's a jerk. If he fools you twice, you're a jerk. Only he didn't use the word jerk.
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Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.
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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.
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I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.
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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?
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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
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Today Washington is our Hollywood, the Senate our Warner Bros., the White House our Beverly Hills. People who never read a line of a movie magazine deal with the lives of leaders as if they were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
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I rewrite a great deal. I'm always fiddling, always changing something. I'll write a few words - then I'll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.
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What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.
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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
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We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.
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People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
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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.
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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
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When you live alone, you can be sure that the person who squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle wasn't committing a hostile act.
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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?
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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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