Quotations on Journalism

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

~ Oscar Wilde

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

~ Matthew Arnold

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

~ Cyril Connolly

More than print and ink, a newspaper is a collection of fierce individualists who somehow manage to perform the astounding daily miracle of merging their own personalities under the discipline of the deadline and retain the flavor of their own minds in print.

~ Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

~ Arthur Miller

Half my lifetime I have earned my living by selling words, and I hope thoughts.

~ Winston Churchill

Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

~ G.K. Chesterton

No news is good news.

~ Proverbs

A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Reporters are like puppets. They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings.

~ Lyndon Baines Johnson

Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.

~ Oscar Wilde

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

~ Oscar Wilde

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever.

~ Oscar Wilde

Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.

~ Adlai E. Stevenson

Journalism -- an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

~ Rebecca West

Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself.

~ Norman Mailer

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

~ Frank Zappa