Quotes
Quotes
"If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worthy reading,
Or do things worth the writing. "
-Benjamin Franklin
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of
any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in
anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction
is the last degradation of a free and moral agent."
-Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Francis Hopkinson,
March 13, 1789
"Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery,
of party, faction, and division of society."
-John Adams
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have
the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
"
-Frederick Douglass
"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the
ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence."
-Frederick Douglass
"Once we start worrying too often or too deeply about what certain
individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start
selling our souls for the sake of expediency. I suggest if that day ever
comes, then the press has had it."
-- Otis Chandler, 1969
"Nothing's riding on this, except the First Amendment to the Constitution,
freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country. Not that any
of that matters, but if you guys f--k up again, I'm gonna get mad."
-Ben Bradlee to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
in the motion picture "All The President's Men."
"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, and yes it can inspire.
But it can do so only to the extenet that humans are determined to use
it to those ends. Otherwise it is nothing but wires and lights in a box.
-Edward R. Murrow to the RTNDA Convention,
October 15, 1958
"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember
that we are not descended from fearful [people], [people] who feared to
write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the
moment, unpopular."
-Edward R. Murrow from "See It Now," March 7, 1954
"Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians
about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved
the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find
recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism
and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.... If
this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to
read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER. For surely we shall pay for using this
most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from
the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive."
Edward R. Murrow at the RTNDA Convention, October
15, 1958
"Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation."
-Edward R. Murrow
"It is well to remember that freedom through the press is the thing
that comes first. Most of us probably feel we couldn't be free without
newspapers, and that is the real reason we want the newspapers to be free."
-- Edward R. Murrow
"One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that
both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business,
advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding
profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles."
-- Edward R. Murrow
"We cannot make good news out of bad practice."
-Edward R. Murrow
"Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave
yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another
Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom
widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings
hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible."
-H.L. Mencken
"One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing."
-H.L. Mencken
Truth - "Something somehow discreditable to someone."
-H.L. Mencken
Democracy - "The theory that the common people know what's
good for them, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H.L. Mencken
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
-Hunter S. Thompson
"Journalism, largely consists of saying `Lord Jones is Dead' to people
who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.''
-G.K. Chesterton
"It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell."
-William Storey, 1861
"The guiding ideological principles of most American newsrooms are
entropy, chaos, procrastination and lunch."
- Renee Loth of the Boston Globe
"The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists.
They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their
countrymen, and make themselves heard by them."
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
If you stayed away from the campaign for any period of time and then
came on again, the first thing that struck you was the shocking physical
deterioration of the press corps. During the summer, the reporters had
looked fairly healthy. Now their skin was pasty and greenish, they had
ugly dark pouches under their glazed eyes, and their bodies had become
bloated with the regimen of nonstop drinking and five or six starchy airplane
meals every day. Toward the end, they began to suffer from a fiendish combination
of fatigue and anxiety. They had arrived at the last two weeks, when the
public finally wanted to read about the campaign -- front-page play every
day! -- and they were so tired that it nearly killed them to pound out
a decent piece.
-- Timothy Crouse, in ``The Boys on the Bus,''
1973
"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who
can't talk for people who can't read."
-- Frank Zappa (1940-1993)
"Today was the end of the auto show in Minneapolis, so let's observe
four minutes of silence."
-Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, after
being told he had four minutes to fill.
"Television [is] a high-impact medium. It does some things no other
force can do-transmitting electronic pictures through the air.
Still, as an explored, comprehensive medium, it is not a substitute for
print."
-Walter Cronkite
"There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are
all free, or you are not free."
-Walter Cronkite
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little
pill of news every day-23 minutes-and that's supposed to be enough."
-Walter Cronkite
"And that's the way it is."
-Walter Cronkite
"Good night and good luck."
-Edward R. Murrow
"Good night, good luck and good news tomorrow."
-Bill Burns, KDKA-TV
"From the mountains to the sea to all of Southern California..."
-News intro used by Jerry Dunphy, L.A. Anchorman.
News - "The first rough draft of history."
- Ben Bradlee
News - "Literature in a hurry."
-- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
"Groucho Marx' health took a turn for the worse today. He died."
-Pittsburgh Anchor - name withheld to protect the
guilty.
"Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother
and child."
-Dan Quayle
"I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix."
-Dan Quayle
"Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts."
- Dan Quayle
"Lookit, I've done it their way this far and now it's my turn. I'm
my own handler. Any questions? Ask me ... There's not going to be any more
handler stories because I'm the handler ... I'm Doctor Spin."
- Dan Quayle
"Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things."
-Dan Quayle
"The news is the one thing that the networks can point to with pride.
Everything else they do is crap - and they know it."
- Fred Friendly
"Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives
its readers an opportunity to live it."
-John Hersey
"News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate
seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day."
-Gene Fowler
"A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago
that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head
of a state."
-Walter Lippmann
"The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there
is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were."
-David Brinkley
"Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without
courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice
any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."
- Maya Angelou
"The press is the enemy."
-Richard M. Nixon
"I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone
who brings people together. "
-George W. Bush
"Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicine as we used to know
it."
-George W. Bush
" Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature
because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods. "
-George W. Bush
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because
they have to say something."
-Plato
" False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the
soul with evil."
-Socrates
" A job on a newspaper is a special thing. Every day you take something
that you found out about, and you put it down and in a matter of hours
it becomes a product. Not just a product like a can or something. It is
a personal product that people, a lot of people, take the time to sit down
and read."
-Jimmy Breslin
"With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
-Arthur Carlson on "WKRP in Cincinnati"