Quotes & Sayings About Commentators

Concentration of ownership in the media is high and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well ... — Noam Chomsky

What I and other commentators do is attempt to move the public opinion. We try to change minds. — Ann Coulter

How science dwindles, and how volumes swell,
How commentators each dark passage shun,
And hold their farthing candle to the sun! — Edward Young

This last point is a request to the English-speaking reader. In France, certain half-witted 'commentators' persist in labelling me a 'structuralist'. I have been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis. I should be grateful if a more serious public would free me from a connection that certainly does me honour, but that I have not deserved. — Michel Foucault

Interviews, and hence interviewers, are there to help shed light, and to let viewers judge for themselves. We are not judges, juries, commentators or torturers - nor friends, either. — Andrew Marr

How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.' — Craig Brown

As Democratic losses mounted in Senate races across the country on election night, some liberal commentators clung to the idea that dissatisfied voters were sending a generally anti-incumbent message, and not specifically repudiating Democratic officeholders. But the facts of the election just don't support that story. — Byron York

It had to go in, but it didn't. — Peter Drury

Real writers-that is, capital W Writers-rarely make much money. Their biggest reward is the occasional reader's response ... Commentators-in-print voicing big fat opinions-you might call us small w writers-get considerably more feedback than Writers. The letters I personally find most flattering are not the very rare ones that speak well of my editorials, but the occasional reader who wants to know who writes them. I always happily assume the letter-writers is implying that the editorials are so good that I couldn't have written them myself. — Malcolm Forbes

Tugay is writhing around all over the place as if he were dead — Alan Green

What prompts so many commentators to speak of the 'end of
history', of post-modernity, 'second modernity' and 'surmodernity',
or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the
arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under
which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long
effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its
'natural limit' . — Zygmunt Bauman

This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians cited a number of factors related to the stresses of modern civilization: the increased speed of communication facilitated by the telegraph and railroad; the "unmelodious" clamor of city life replacing the "rhythmical" sounds of nature; and the rise of the tabloid press that exploded "local horrors" into national news. These nervous diseases became an epidemic among "the ultracompetitive businessman and the socially active woman. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

I'm a sports fan sometimes when I'm drunk. All my friends gamble on sports so whenever we watch a game, everyone's pissed off at the end! Sometimes the commentators speak so quickly, I think you've got to be on drugs to listen to them. — Pablo Francisco

The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious. — Cordelia Fine

American Heritage Dictionary: "The only rationale for condemning the construction is based on a false analogy with Latin. . . . In general, the Usage Panel accepts the split infinitive." Merriam-Webster Unabridged online dictionary: "Even though there has never been a rational basis for objecting to the split infinitive, the subject has become a fixture of folk belief about grammar. . . . Modern commentators . . . usually say it's all right to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity. Since clarity is the usual reason for splitting, this advice means merely that you can split them whenever you need to." Encarta World English Dictionary: "There is no grammatical basis for rejecting split infinitives. — Steven Pinker

Revelation: a famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing. — Ambrose Bierce

The earth spins further from help. Beyond us the heart monitors go on, the fluorescent lights buzz, the commentators shout, the casino leaves fall into the desert, sirens blare. But all we hear is the rain. — Hannah Lillith Assadi

It is a logical absurdity to equate democracy with freedom in the way that mainstream political philosophers and commentators typically do. A system where individuals and minorities are at the mercy of unconstrained majorities hardly constitutes freedom in any meaningful sense. — Keith Preston

You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence. — Noam Chomsky

Mr. Harappa,' the Angrez television interviewer is asking, 'many commentators would say, there is a widely-held view, some sectors of opinion maintain, your opponents allege, what would you say to the suggestion, that by some standards, from certain points of view, in a way, your style of government might be described as being perhaps, to some extent ... ( ... ) — Salman Rushdie

Here's a little newsflash for those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I'm going to Washington to serve this great country. — Sarah Palin

As we watched Judge Clarence
Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation
hearings, all of the commentators
said the same thing: 'One of these
people in the room is lying.' Do you
believe that? You've got two lawyers
and 14 senators in the room, and only
one of them is lying? — Jay Leno

A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes. — Edmund Phelps

Anelka was travelling so fast that he couldn't keep his own feet — Clive Tyldesley

In his own lifetime Jesus made no impact on history. This is something that I cannot but regard as a special dispensation on God's part, and, I like to think, yet another example of the ironical humour which informs so many of His purposes. To me, it seems highly appropriate that the most important figure in all history should thus escape the notice of memoirists, diarists, commentators, all the tribe of chroniclers who even then existed — Malcolm Muggeridge

Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with remark that I was the only 'religious nut' - his term for a believer - in his stable of regular reviewers. — Garry Wills

Critics should be looked at simply as commentators. — Twyla Tharp

don't think we can handle another apology," Stewart went on, throwing down the magazine. "Because let me tell you, I know what an apology from this governor sounds like, and it ain't really an apology. It's more like - ." He paused. Someone said, "More like what?" "I'll just put it this way. His apologies tend to have an unapologetic tone." Another minute passed, and then the governor walked in. All went silent. He sat in the only remaining chair and made jokes with one of the interns. A week before, he had been openly talked about by influential commentators in New York and Washington as a presidential candidate. In national media reports, his name had been routinely used in conjunction with the terms "principled stand," "courageous," "crazy, — Barton Swaim

What Pamuk is also engaging with at this point and throughout the book is the relationship of memory and photography and the argument put forward by Walter Benjamin and other commentators that photography creates a 'false' or 'counter' memory which results in what Sontag calls the replacement of memory by a photograph.24 — Patrizia Di Bello

The Baggio brothers, of course, are not related. — George Hamilton

Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur's strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public. — Victor Davis Hanson

I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of the world wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but this state wants war, war and war. — Norman Finkelstein

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators. — Abraham Lincoln

Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world. — David Berlinski

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"] — William Hazlitt

The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. — Isaiah Berlin

John Moncur has been much more effective since he came on — Alan Green

It was one of the best goals I've seen this millenium. — Tony Gubba

The closet is the best study. The commentators are good instructors, but the Author Himself is far better. — Charles Spurgeon

Referring to professor Muller's Berkely Earth Surface Temperature Project, The Best project's treatment of science and of the public has been shoddy. That so many so-called reporters in the mainstream media should have been so uncritical and accepting of what was clearly misrepresentation is shocking. Once again they have been found to be supporters and advocates for a particular point of view when they should have been critical commentators and journalists. Climate science is important. It deserves better. — David Whitehouse

She had stayed inside so that she could watch it on the TV in the room, let him know how it had looked on video, how the commentators and pundits had framed it. It — Neal Stephenson

That shot was going goalboundward — Clive Tyldesley

To the despair of every economist, it seems almost impossible for most people other than trained economists to comprehend how a price system works. Reporters and TV commentators seem especially resistant to the elementary principles they supposedly imbibed in freshman economics. Second, — Milton Friedman

I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed. — Howard Zinn

And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. — G.K. Chesterton

The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln. — Russell Baker

Ziege hits it high for Heskey who isn't playing — Alan Green

From the ancient Chinese commentators found in the Giles edition. Of these four, Giles' 1910 edition is the most scholarly and presents the reader an incredible amount of information concerning Sun Tzu's text, much more than any other translation. The Giles' edition of the ART OF WAR, as stated above, was a scholarly work. Dr. Giles was a leading sinologue at the time and an assistant in the Department — Sun Tzu

Politicians, bureaucrats, editors, new commentators, 'economists' teachers,' and other word artists who denounce private enterprise and praise socialism are their own worst enemies ... these attackers are unwittingly destroying the sources of their own livelihood. They kill the geese that lay the golden eggs - and don't know it! — Leonard Read

I am not asking for government censorship or any other kind of censorship. I am asking whether a kind of censorship already exists when the news that forty million Americans receive each night is determined by a handful of men responsible only to their corporate employers and filtered through a handful of commentators who admit to their own set of biases. — Spiro T. Agnew

I think all senior politicians tend to be rather more subtle then the commentators would have it. It is a natural tendency for human beings to try to classify. We all have this classification urge - so and so is such and such, that person is in that camp - but look, most sophisticated people defy stereotype. — Tony Abbott

Perhaps part of your problem is that you've been reading the commentators and not the people they were commenting on. A common mistake but fatal when you're trying to learn something. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true. — Hilary Mantel

Oh, rather give me commentators plain, Who with no deep researches vex the brain; Who from the dark and doubtful love to run, And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun. — George Crabbe

We are somewhat amused by the hysteria manifest in the press at the suggestion by Gordon Liddy that if one is menaced by bad guys (particularly the ninja) one is wise to shoot for the head. That statement has got a whole bunch of journalists and commentators bleeding from the nose. One wonders why it should. Where else should you shoot a man if he is probably wearing an armored vest? If you decide to shoot you have made the big decision. Where you place your shot is merely a technical matter. — Jeff Cooper

Having failed as an NFL commentator, Limbaugh understands the power of football. — Jason Whitlock

Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics. — Tony Blair

Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened. — Salman Rushdie

If a doctor said you had stomach cancer, would you consult Rush Limbaugh for a second opinion? Of course, that sounds like nonsense, but many Americans have no qualms about listening to political commentators and untrained activists when it comes to even more complex scientific questions. — Kurt Eichenwald

One could dismiss the zombie trend as merely feeding a mass public that craves the strange and bizarre. Such an explanation would be only skin-deep. Popular culture often provides a window into the subliminal or unstated fears of citizens, and zombies are no exception. Some cultural commentators argue that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are a primary cause for renewed interest in the living dead, and the numbers appear to back up this assertion. — Daniel Drezner

Many people theorize poverty, but so many elements of poverty, individually, for most people who theorize about poverty would be really difficult to even comprehend the individual things. Just take homelessness. If you are homeless, what does it mean not to have a post box where people can contact you; what does it mean not knowing where you're going to sleep at the end of the day; what does it mean not having a place where you can store what little you might possess. So dealing with homelessness in itself is a huge thing for most people who are commentators [on] or benefactors to poverty. — Kumi Naidoo

Belloc led the charge in his critique of this misguided sense of superiority and myopic view of progress. But it was he alone among historians, social commentators, and counter-cultural voices who predicted that Islam - or as he called it, "Mohammedanism" - would rise again and, as it had in the past, harness the technology of the West as a weapon to turn back on the West and crush it by degrees. After September 11, 2001, no one is surprised to learn that Islam is turning the West's superiority back on itself; what is surprising is that a lone historian and essayist saw this coming in the 1930s. That he captivates and places the reader in the middle of the action is an added bonus to the prophetic vision of what embroils our age. — Hilaire Belloc

John Arne Riise was deservedly blown up for that foul — Alan Green

Finally, in 1888, Cixi approved the Western-style Navy Regulations. It was in endorsing these Regulations that she effectively unveiled China's first national flag. The country had had no national ensign, until its engagement with the West at the beginning of her reign necessitated a triangular-shaped golden yellow flag for the nascent navy. Now she endorsed its change into the internationally standard quadrangular shape. On the flag, named the Yellow Dragon, was a vividly blue, animated dragon, raising its head towards a bright-red globe, the sun. With the birth of this national flag, remarked contemporary Western commentators, 'China proudly took her proper place among the nations. — Jung Chang

Sometimes we listen to too many commentators about things that don't affect their lives because they're in a different tax bracket. Or to the so-called clergymen giving their interpretation of God's word, and yet they're not rolling the same way in their own lives. — Stevie Wonder

I believe now that there's real fear of what happens once The Narrative blows up - because once we've ripped the rich to shreds, what we're left with is a whole bunch of broke people wondering where the hell their money went, without even a soothing fairy tale to help them get to sleep at night.
People in the financial community who actually worked in that world, the traders and the bankers themselves who joked with me about "those motherfuckers," did not have these illusions. You're not going to be good at making money if you need there to be a halo around the moneymaking process. The only people who really clung to those illusions were the financial commentators, right up to the point where those illusions became completely unsustainable. — Matt Taibbi

Astute social commentators had been anticipating this rightward shift since the early 1980s. Bertram Gross predicted, in his book Friendly Fascism, that the United States might arrive at a gentler form of the virulent ultranationalism, antilabor activity, and racism, which coalesced into fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Corporate America would tolerate such a rightward drift, so the argument went, because more government restrictions on personal freedom would enhance business efforts to discipline the labor force and increase corporate profits. — Steve Brouwer

In the United States, commentators recognize that, generally speaking, most people who hold liberal positions over a range of issues will likely vote Democratic, while most people, again generally speaking, who hold conservative positions will vote Republican. — Stockwell Day

Note the significant fact that we always hear of the "fall of man," not the fall of woman, showing that the consensus of human thought has been more unerring than masculine interpretation. Reading this narrative carefully, it is amazing that any set of men ever claimed that the dogma of the inferiority of woman is here set forth. The conduct of Eve from the beginning to the end is so superior to that of Adam. The command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge was given to the man alone before woman was formed. Genesis ii, 17. Therefore the injunction was not brought to Eve with the impressive solemnity of a Divine Voice, but whispered to her by her husband and equal. It was a serpent supernaturally endowed, a seraphim as Scott and other commentators have claimed, who talked with Eve, and whose words might reasonably seem superior to the second-hand story of her — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A peep, peep, peep, another peep, and that's it. — Barry Davies

Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary. — Pankaj Mishra

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy.
None of this is convincing. Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) We must move beyond such facile explanations. The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on. — Jonathan Gottschall

Jim Leighton is looking a sharp as a tank — Barry Davies

The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.
The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this. — Idries Shah

Gosh, was I wrong. Never listen to a pundit. Is there such a thing as "magnetic back-assward"? We pundits and commentators have had our compass needles pointed in that direction for the past eighteen months. Want a stock tip? I would — P. J. O'Rourke

Some commentators have drawn such a stark and gloomy picture of the Weimar Republic's early difficulties that the Republic seems foredoomed to failure from the outset ... The conditions in which Weimar democracy were born were certainly not such as to help it flourish; and as it unfolded, it was clearly saddled with a burden of problems, in a range of areas. — Mary Fulbrook

To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties. — Paul Samuelson

The lesson taught us by these kindly commentators on my present experience is that dogmatic faith compels the best minds and hearts to narrowness and insolence. — Harriet Martineau

So as not to risk appearing to introduce a duality, let alone a plurality, into the one and personal God, the Semitic texts and their commentators refuse to give the right answer by stating that God, being "all-powerful," "doeth what He wills"; we find this argument in Isaiah, Job and Saint Paul, as well as in the Koran. It is a doubl-edged argument, yet for certain psychological reasons it was efficacious for three or four millennia, in the climate for which it was destined. - p98 — Frithjof Schuon

Does Michael Cole deserve to take Jim Ross' place as a commentator? — Daniel Bryan

He went through a non-existant gap. — Clive Tyldesley

We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen actors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators. — Stephen Fry

Yet here she sat on the sofa, working rather than dealing with the subject that seemed to fill the small flat, pressing against the walls, keeping the atmosphere perpetually stiff with tension. Commentators — Robert Galbraith

History teaches us, in no mistaken language, how often customs and practices, which were originated without lawful warrant, and opposed to the sound construction of the law, have come to overload and pervert it, as commentators on the text of Holy Scripture have established doctrines wholly at variance with its true spirit. — Samuel Freeman Miller

Unlike white commentators, who were hamstrung by the fear that they would be labeled racist, I could voice my criticisms of the feudal, religious, and repressive mechanisms that were holding back women from Muslim communities. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person's life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader's style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented. — John C. Maxwell

I find it so easy to read qualified commentators who are 180 degrees opposed to each other. — Neil Oliver

A dangerous thesis has taken hold among many in the GOP: that it might be better to lose the '06 election and re-group. In American history, when a faction in the majority party decides the party is tired and could benefit from some time in the wilderness, the voters usually oblige. Most recently, the latest issue of Washington Monthly includes a cover story [link] featuring seven such articles from prominent Republican strategists, insiders and commentators. — Larry Sabato

Submission, when it is submission to the truth - and when the truth is known to be both beautiful and merciful - has nothing in common with fatalism or stoicism as these terms are understood in the Western tradition, because its motivation is different. According to Fakhr ad-Din ar-RazT, one of the great commentators upon the Quran: The worship of the eyes is
weeping, the worship of the ears is listening, the worship of the tongue is praise, the worship of the hands is giving, the worship of the body is effort, the worship of the heart is fear and hope, and the worship of the spirit is surrender and satisfaction in Allah. — Fakhr Al-Din Al-Razi

It has been the practice of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth, and as the word of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and have anathematized each other about the supposable meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing, another that it meant directly the contrary, and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they have called understanding the Bible.
It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not. — Thomas Paine

My parents, particularly my father, had been used by commentators, political journalists and political commentators, to attack me, and the collateral damage was the reputations of my father and my mother. — Karl Rove

While commentators on Fox and right-wing radio have the backing of Rupert Murdoch, a major Republican contributor, and other conservative corporations, progressives understand that their position is extremely vulnerable. — Bernie Sanders

It's bizarre to me that you can have political commentators, sports commentators, weather commentators, but with medicine, people go, "You can't do that." — Drew Pinsky

He caught that with the outside of his instep. — George Hamilton

The Pope, if nothing else, should be a Catholic. If he were to announce that women would make great priests, except it's a pity that more of them aren't gay, because of the greater compassion they could bring to the task, it might endear him to liberal Catholic commentators , but it would make him something other than a Catholic, in the true sense. — Declan Lynch

There's no such thing as great art or poor art. Art is subjective expression. As such, it can be judged only as popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may one day receive a million-dollar bid at Christie's. Art has, therefore, no use for critics but frequently finds itself amused by commentators. — Ron Brackin

There are hundreds of fine journalists who regularly inform us of what is happening in the world around us; and innumerable commentators who provide intelligent and objective insight on public policy matters. — Bob Barr

The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. — Susan Sontag