Abraham Polonsky's Quotes

A man could spend the rest of his life trying to remember what he shouldn't have said.

Do you know what it's like to love and be alone?

If you don't get killed, it's a lucky day for anybody.

Money has no moral opinions.

You must never throw away things that are worth good money.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

I'll give you my answer calmly and sensibly, my final answer. My final answer is finally no. The answer is no! Absolutely and finally no! Finally and positively no! No! No! No! N - O!

Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal. D'you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?

Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.

One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.

The one indication that I got that I was doing the right job in Bosnia was that at different periods of time all the factions came down very hard on me.

When I see somebody being mistreated, my eyes tear up and I want to stop it. And I believe that the best thing I can do is to write about it, because if I insert myself into the equation it doesn't really do much good, but if I write about it I think it could do more good.

But on the other hand, in the midst of the chaos, you find normal people. You find people who are willing to risk their lives to tell you what they saw, even though they have no dog in the fight.

And then I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to go to China in 1980, which was quite early.

I had my life threatened by Bosnian Serbs on numerous occasions.

I was posted to China in the summer of 1988, which was the greatest time ever, I think, to have been in China.

I've been shot at on numerous occasions.

In some ways the domestic reporting is a lot easier because Americans will talk to you about anything.

My main form of transportation at that time was a bicycle, because bicycles could move though the crowd.

Srebrenica was a horrendous war crime and it had to be uncovered.

Stanford had no journalism program so I just learned by doing, effectively.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.

The work is a calling. It demands that type of obsession.