Newspapers Quotes

Pro-government press is not a press it is just a lie-generating ugly machine; it is a guard dog, guarding only the official thieves, not the public!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Pretty average headlines for a worldwide catastrophe,” Jane remarked as she read from Hollywood's Highest. “Some man in Africa claimed to have found the cure for AIDS, yet another politician said something about the president and now formally regrets it, and a pop star OD'd while an actress lost fifteen pounds overnight, and here's how you can, too!” She continued reading. “Oh, wow. The 'Celebrititties' section says she was in a car accident and her arms had to be amputated. Damn.

~ Bryant A. Loney

One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

~ Gwendolyn Brooks

The news isn't there to tell you what happened. It's there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear.

~ Joss Whedon

Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.

~ Finley Peter Dunne

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

~ Margaret Atwood

A free press doesn't mean it's not a tame press.

~ Andrew Vachss

Newspapers abound, and though they have endured decades of decline in readership and influence, they can still form impressive piles if no one takes them out to the trash.

~ Jon Stewart

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.

~ Henry David Thoreau

What 'primitive' men called gossip, 'civilized' men call news.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

~ Christopher Hitchens

As touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists....

~ Tom Rachman

The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous — licentious — abominable — infernal — Not that I ever read them — no — I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan

It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.

~ Umberto Eco

Journalism delivers news, but not necessarily relevance.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That's part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good aggressive newspaper will become part of that something.

~ Ben Bradlee

Now listen,' said George angrily, 'I’ve been in a newspaper office all evening and I know better than you what’s going on.''Nonsense. If there’s one place in the world where nobody knows what’s going on, it’s a newspaper office.

~ Jack Iams

As the final computerized decade of the twentieth century came into view, time itself seemed to speed up and compress into smaller and smaller bytes, leaving less and less time over the breakfast table to ruminate on the fascinating aboriginal lore from the Australian outback or on the clandestine Israeli airlift of Ethiopian Jews out of southern Sudan. Readers preferred news that affected their own lives and they wanted it now. Leisure time was a luxury that fewer and fewer times subscribers enjoyed.

~ Dennis Mcdougal

Interviews were invented to make journalism less passive. Instead of waiting for something to happen, journalists ask someone what should or could happen.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

One of the cardinal rules of journalism: Once you have cabled a story you must stick by it and back it up, unless something completely overwhelming proves you to have been wrong. In such a case, just drop the matter.

~ Wynant Davis Hubbard

There is a fearful moment of reckoning before us should it ever chance that when all our trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar of the patron-fiend of news, the newspaper supply shall suddenly be cut off and we find ourselves some fine morning minus our tidbits of shame and failure and disaster, left to the companionship of our own thoughts. Dante never imagined a terror like this.

~ Adeline Knapp

Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.

~ Hannen Swaffer

Newspapers have developed what might be called a vested interest in catastrophe. If they can spot a fight they play up that fight. If they can uncover a tragedy they will headline that tragedy.

~ Harry A. Overstreet

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.

~ Erwin Knoll

I do not take a single newspaper nor read one a month and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament but in the reporters' gallery yonder there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

~ Finley Peter Dunne

Remember son many a good story has been ruined by over-verification.

~ James Gordon Bennett

Don't be afraid to make a mistake your readers might like it.

~ William Randolph Hearst

One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.

~ Clifton Fadiman

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

~ Matthew Arnold

The sports page records people's accomplishments the front page usually records nothing but man's failures.

~ Earl Warren

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the paper today ' we sigh.

~ Paul Valéry

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism nor are cliches for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work by its very todayness is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

~ Cyril Connolly

He had been kicked in the head by a mule when young and believed everything he read in the Sunday papers.

~ George Ade

An editor - a person employed on a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff and to see that the chaff is printed.

~ Elbert Hubbard

The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.

~ Frank Miller

News is the first rough draft of history.

~ Benjamin Bradlee

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell.

~ Wilbur F. Storey