Motivational Quotes

Journalism and journalists

More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.

- Lapham, Lewis H.

Journalism and journalists Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Journalism and journalists

Lapham, Lewis H.

Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.

Priestland, Gerald

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.

Kraus, Karl

What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height.

Livingstone, Ken

We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused -- in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery -- by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press -- their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.

Poe, Edgar Allan

In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.

Twain, Mark

Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it.

Greeley, Horace

The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.

Malcolm, Janet

The press is like the air, a chartered libertine.

Pitt, William

10.

Write the news as if your very life depended on it. It does!

Broun, Heywood

11.

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.

Duras, Marguerite

12.

A journalist is a person who has mistaken their calling.

Bismarck, Otto Von

13.

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. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

He types his labored column -- weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.

Davies, Robertson

15.

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

Connolly, Cyril

16.

Journalism could be described as turning one's enemies into money.

Brown, Craig

17.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Mailer, Norman

18.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

Stoppard, Tom

19.

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat -- no matter who killed the meat for him.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

21.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

Duras, Marguerite

22.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

23.

A professional whose job it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

Northcliffe, Lord

24.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

25.

In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.

Sampson, Anthony

26.

Every journalist owes tribute to the evil one.

La Fontaine, Jean De

27.

I find I journalize too tediously. Let me try to abbreviate.

Boswell, James

28.

Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism -- and the best journalists have always known this. True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

Thompson, Hunter S.

29.

Journalism is the entertainment business.

Herbert, Frank

30.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people -- including me -- would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Thompson, Hunter S.

31.

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

Kraus, Karl

32.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Malcolm, Janet

33.

The facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself.

White, William Allen

34.

Our job is like a baker's work -- his rolls are tasty as long as they're fresh; after two days they're stale; after a week, they're covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

35.

Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.

Cockburn, Claud

36.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

Niebuhr, Reinhold

37.

Journalism is organized gossip.

Eggleston, Edward

38.

Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.

Noonan, Peggy

39.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

40.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

Evans, Harold

41.

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.

Zappa, Frank

42.

The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information, misinformation, misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

Bernstein, Carl

43.

The real news is bad news.

Mcluhan, Marshall

44.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.

Marquis, Don

46.

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

O'Rourke, P. J.

47.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Greene, Graham

48.

It was when reporters became journalists and when objectivity gave way to searching for truth, that an aura of distrust and fear arose around the New Journalist.

Geyer, Georgie Anne

49.

Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news.

Reston, James

50.

Opinionated writing is always the most difficult... simply because it involves retaining in the cold morning-after crystal of the printed word the burning flow of molten feeling.

Lyall, Gavin