Quotes from Harold Evans

Steve Jobs in 1996. I like to think that we may begin with imitation, graduate to emulation, and then aspire to creation.

later disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew. "In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4H club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.

President Obama wrote his own speeches. In a visit to a mosque in Baltimore he pitted his eloquence against the anti-Muslim demagoguery of Donald Trump, running for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election. The image Obama evoked was the parable of the Good Samaritan, but indirectly, and look how he did it in a single phrase, the moral thought fused by a gentle alliteration: "None of us can be silent. We can't be bystanders to bigotry.

Thomson Reuters, for instance, advises reporters and editors: "It is acceptable to say that a guerrilla organization claimed responsibility for carrying out an attack. Do not say it claimed credit.

Author Edward Johnson neatly labels such cop-outs as the pussyfooting passive.

I appreciate engineers, I wrote a book about their achievements, but I deprecate what they and other techies do to English words. Hey, these nouns and verbs aren't bits of silicon you can dope with chemicals (boron, phosphorus, and arsenic), drop into a kiln at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and slice and dice. Words breathe. They need TLC—you know