media

1.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

- W. H. Auden

2.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man -- the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

- Nietzsche, Friedrich

3.

What self-control doesn't mean is mindless self-sacrifice or knee-jerk self-denial. On the contrary, it represents an affirmation of self, for it requires not the negation of instinct but its integration into a more complete form of character-one that takes account of more than just immediate pleasures and pains. The self-control I'm talking about means acting in keeping with your highest level of reflection.

- Daniel Akst

4.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.

- Baldwin, James

5.

Everybody tells jokes, but we still need comedians.

- Jimmy Wales

6.

SCARIFICATION, n. A form of penance practised by the mediaeval pious. The rite was performed, sometimes with a knife, sometimes with a hot iron, but always, says Arsenius Asceticus, acceptably if the penitent spared himself no pain nor harmless disfigurement. Scarification, with other crude penances, has now been superseded by benefaction. The founding of a library or endowment of a university is said to yield to the penitent a sharper and more lasting pain than is conferred by the knife or iron, and is therefore a surer means of grace. There are, however, two grave objections to it as a penitential method: the good that it does and the taint of justice.

- Ambrose Bierce

7.

"Whoops" is a word that should never be said by some professions - Pilots, Racing car drivers, and hair colourists come immediately to mind but Dentists also have to be up in the top five.

- Richard Stubbs

8.

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.

- Allen, Fred A.

9.

There are people whom one loves immediately and forever. Even to know they are alive in the world with one is quite enough.

- Nancy Spain

10.

MISERICORDE, n. A dagger which in mediaeval warfare was used by the foot soldier to remind an unhorsed knight that he was mortal.

- Ambrose Bierce

11.

I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

- George Carlin

12.

You need to have enough immediate profits that you can finance the long-range growth without diluting the stock.

- Cook, Paul

13.

One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm.

- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

14.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent.

- Vidal, Gore

15.

Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure.

- Maistre, Joseph De

16.

There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.

- Kennedy, John F.

17.

Politeness is as much concerned in answering letters within a reasonable time, as it is in returning a bow, immediately.

- Chesterfield, Lord

18.

I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.

- Albert Camus

19.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

- Voltaire

20.

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe... the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.

- Twain, Mark