Gail Collins Quotes

I've known him since 1954 and I've never taken Mujib Rahiman seriously - I understood from the very first moment that there was no depth to him, no preparation, that he was an agitator breathing a lot of fire and with an absolute lack of ideas.

Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice.

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.

We lament the speed of our society and the lack of depth and the nature of disposable information.

I'm just shocked at how blatantly shallow people are sometimes.

They look for the top note to end every song. They don't know what they are singing about. There is no style.

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

The man [President Woodrow Wilson] has no sense of things that penetrates below the surface. With him the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself.

It is nothing.

Trump has words, but there's not really any depth there.

A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

'Vanity' means worthlessness.

People like Duran Duran were a big production but it was a nothingness. That's just my personal opinion.

Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.

Some men are very entertaining for a first interview, but after that they are exhausted, and run out; on a second meeting we shall find them flat and monotonous; like hand-organs, we have heard all their tunes.

Some people are so extremely whiffling and inconsiderable that they are as far from any real faults as from substantial virtues.

Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

An empty man is full of himself.

You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me.

The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.