Graydon Carter quotes

We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior. (Graydon Carter)
I have always thought you could take the measure of a man by his sports manners - that is to say, the way in which he conducts himself on the playing field, or even over a game of chess or cards. View quote
Graydon Carter
Most of us have learned the hard way that there are very few things you can absolutely count on in life. View quote
Graydon Carter
Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations. No sirree. Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state. In fact, in a leader, it's a lethal cocktail. View quote
Graydon Carter
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from - dare I say it - God. View quote
Graydon Carter
Life is all about seating and lighting. View quote
Graydon Carter
As you get older and fatter, good clothes can hide a lot. View quote
Graydon Carter
My hunch is that pop culture began to stagnate the moment Americans started to love the past more than they did the future. View quote
Graydon Carter
It's estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it's a distressing figure. View quote
Graydon Carter
Conservatives define themselves more by their hatred of liberals than anything else, and, conversely, liberals by their distaste for conservatives. View quote
Graydon Carter
Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure. (Graydon Carter)
Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember. View quote
Graydon Carter
I might wear a dinner jacket once a year to our Oscar party - that's a big thing - but I don't go to parties. I'm social but I'm not a socialite person. View quote
Graydon Carter
Fashion is a dangerous road to go down. Anybody who is going to have children later in life had best not be too fashionable because the photos will come back to haunt them. View quote
Graydon Carter
The greatest thing that prepared me for editing Vanity Fair was having four kids because you just learn to subjugate your ego with the greater interest in mind. View quote
Graydon Carter
In less than a year, the Bush administration will strut out of office, leaving the country in roughly the same condition a toddler leaves a diaper. View quote
Graydon Carter
The danger of leaving overwhelming wealth and power in the grasp of a small minority is a lesson that leaders such as ousted Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have learned a little too late, as the demonstrations across the Arab world indicate. View quote
Graydon Carter
Water-boarding can result in damage to the lungs and the brain, as well as long-term psychological trauma. View quote
Graydon Carter
Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time. View quote
Graydon Carter
Only institutions that go about the old-fashioned business of taking in deposits from customer A and lending them out to customer B should be called banks. The rest should call themselves what they are. 'Parlors' would be appropriate, or 'dens' - words more suitable to venerable betting pursuits. View quote
Graydon Carter
Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting. (Graydon Carter)
Every man in the back of their minds would like to own a bar or a racehorse. View quote
Graydon Carter
The fact is that movie stars are as insecure as the rest of us - if not more so. Many live in a luxurious bubble in which their best friends are their trainer, their hairdresser, their publicist, and their Kabbalah instructor. View quote
Graydon Carter
The shelf life of a movie actor or actress is so short, it's like milk. View quote
Graydon Carter
History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities. View quote
Graydon Carter