Quotations on Media

ADVERTISING

Advertising is the first, second, and third elements of "success."

P. T. BARNUM (1810-1891), in Michael Zuckerman, "And in the Center Ring...," Pennsylvania Gazette, May 1993

The successful advertiser is the master of a new art: the art of making things true by saying they are so. He is a devotee of the technique of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 5.4, 1961

When the gods wish to punish us, they make us believe our own advertising.

DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 6 (introduction), 1961

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

RAYMOND CHANDLER, letter to Carl Brandt, 15 November 1951, Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker, 1962

One of the main jobs of the advertiser in this conflict between pleasure and guilt is not so much to sell the product as to give moral permission to have fun without guilt.

ERNEST DICHTER (motivational researcher), in Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 6 (epigraph), 1957

Individuals project themselves into products. In buying a car they actually buy an extension of their own personality. When they are "loyal" to a commercial brand, they are loyal to themselves.

ERNEST DICHTER (motivational researcher), The Strategy of Desire, 5, 1960

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

NORMAN DOUGLAS, South Wind, 7, 1917

To keep people buying, you need first to make them dissatisfied with what they have.... Advertising is nothing more than a technique to keep people in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction with what they possess and in a permanent state of itchy acquisitiveness.

FELIX GREENE, "The Face of Capitalism," The Enemy: What Every American Should Know About Imperialism, 1970

 

The popular philosophy... is now molded by the writers of advertising copy, whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Perennial Philosophy, 8, 1946

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

SAMUEL JOHNSON, in The Idler (English journal), 40, 20 January 1759

The advertising industry... encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, "You've come a long way, baby" [the ad slogan of Virginia Slims cigarettes], and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy.

CHRISTOPHER LASCH, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, 4, 1979

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

STEPHEN LEACOCK, "The Perfect Salesman," The Garden of Folly, 1924

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don't know which half.

LORD LEVERHULME (English soap manufacturer and founder of Lever Bros., 1851-1925), in David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 3, 1963

The best ad is a good product.

ALAN H. MEYER, in Rolf B. White, comp, The Great Business Quotations, p. 167, 1986

The [advertiser's] formula is: to make people ashamed of last year's model; to hook up self-esteem itself with the purchasing of this year's; to create a panic for status, and hence a panic of self-evaluation, and to connect its relief with the consumption of specified commodities.

C. WRIGHT MILLS, 1958, Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, 3.10.5, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz, 1963

Whenever my agency is asked to advertise a politician or a political party, we refuse the invitation.... The use of advertising to sell statesmen is the ultimate vulgarity.

DAVID OGILVY, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 11, 1963

When I write an ad, I don't want you to tell me that you find it "creative." I want you to find it so persuasive that you buy the product — or buy it more often.

DAVID OGILVY, in "David Ogilvy's Hard Advice," New York Times, 30 October 1991

We are selling perception as much as reality. We want to fill a need in the consumer's mind, and it really doesn't matter if the need is real or imagined.

KEVIN O'MALLEY (Faberware general manager), on his company's introduction of Microbrew, a microwave coffee maker, in Douglas C. McGill, "Hunting for a Better Cup of Coffee," New York Times, 27 May 1989

Psychological obsolescence [is created] by the double-barreled strategy of (1) making the public style-conscious, and then (2) switching styles.

VANCE PACKARD, The Hidden Persuaders, 16, 1957

By encouraging people constantly to pursue the emblems of success, and by causing them to equate possessions with status, what are we doing to their emotions and their sense of values?

VANCE PACKARD

Creative people are like a wet towel. You wring them out and pick up another one.

CHARLES REVSON (Revlon, Inc. founder and chairman), 1906-1975

Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising, and they wouldn't have to advertise it.

WILL ROGERS (1879-1935), in Rolf B. White, comp., The Great Business Quotations, p. 174, 1986

Merchants of discontent.

ANONYMOUS (AMERICAN), on advertising executives, in Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 2, 1957

 

A satisfied customer is the best advertisement.

SAYING (AMERICAN)

"Advertising is the principal reason why the business man has come to inherit the earth."

James Randolph Adams

"Advertising is of the very essence of democracy. An election goes on every minute of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which manufacturer and which product shall be the leader today, and which shall lead tomorrow."

Bruce Barton (1955), chairman of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 82.

"Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret . . . to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink."

Leo Burnett

"Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats."

Northrop Frye, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry, The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, p. 18.

"The art of publicity is a black art."

Learned Hand, American jurist, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry, The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, p. 19.

"[A]dvertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation."

S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action (1964), New York: Harcourt, p. 268.

"Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can't."

Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 203.

Advertising is "the lubricant for the free-enterprise system."

Leo-Arthur Kelmenson (1976), quoted in Michael McKenna, The Stein & Day Dictionary of Definitive Quotations, 1983, New York: Stein & Day Publishing Co., p. 11.

"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

"Advertising is what you do when you can't go see somebody. That's all it is."

Fairfax Cone (1963), ad agency partner, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.

"Advertising is the life of trade."

Calvin Coolidge, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels & Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969, Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 13.

 

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."

Marshall McLuhan (1976), Canadian social scientist (quoted in Robert Andrews, The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations 1987, p. 5, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry, The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, p. 19.

"Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance."

Marshall McLuhan, introduction to Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction: Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974, New York: Signet (New American Library), p. vii.

"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."

George Orwell, quoted in Angela Partington, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1992, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 501.

Advertising is "[a] ten billion dollar a year misunderstanding with the public."

Chester L. Posey, Senior V.P. & Creative Director, McCann Erickson

"Advertising is the 'wonder' in Wonder Bread."

Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

"Advertising is the art and sole of capitalism. It captures a moment of time through the lense of commerce, reflecting and affecting our lives, making us laugh and cry, while simultaneously giving traction to the engine that propels this free market economy forward into the future."

Jef I. Richards (2001), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.

"Advertising is selling Twinkies to adults"

Donald R. Vance

"Advertising is legalized lying."

H.G. Wells, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 2.

 

"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."

George Santayana

"Advertising is the foot on the accelerator, the hand on the throttle, the spur on the flank that keeps our economy surging forward."

Robert W. Sarnoff, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels & Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969, Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 15.

"The simplest definition of advertising, and one that will probably meet the test of critical examination, is that advertising is selling in print."

Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw Company, p. 5.

 

 

ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES

·         "To many advertising account executives, chronic nervous dyspepsia, psychosomatic tension, and hyperacidity are more than just medical words used in television commercials. These are the very real terms that describe what is probably the most common occupational disease off the advertising game."

- Harry R. Gasker, quoted in Samm Sinclair Baker, The Permissible Lie: The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, p. 8.

• "The agency's account executive should be able to step into the sales manager's shoes if the sales manager drops dead today."

- Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 14.

• "[N]o agency is better than its account executives."

- Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 16.

• "If I had to sum it all up, I'd say there are three breeds of account executives: the play-it-safe-and-by-the-rule-book transmitting agent; the neutralist, who's never quite sure from one day to the next of his role in the agency-client relationship; and the truly creative account man, who may never write a line of copy in his life, but who, in his own way, is every bit as creative as the finest copywriter in the business."

- Emil Mogul (1960), ad executive, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.

 

CLIENTS

·         "The most dangerous thing that can happen to us, I think, is to permit a feeling to develop that any client is a problem. I have always taken the attitude that no account is a 'problem account' but that all accounts have important problems attached to them - that you can waste more time and burn up more nervous energy by fighting a problem than by taking a positive attitude and solving it. It sure gives you a nice, warm glow when you do."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 75.

• "I have learned that you can't have good advertising without a good client, that you can't keep a good client without good advertising, and no client will ever buy better advertising than he understands or has an appetite for."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 57.

• "I have learned that trying to guess what the boss or the client wants is the most debilitating of all influences in the creation of good advertising."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 37.

• "Most agencies run scared, most of the time. . . . Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising. . . . If I were a client, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 64.

• "It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them. Many clients are surrounded by buckpassers who make a fine art of blaming the agency for their own failures. I seize the earliest opportunity to assume the blame."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 55.

• To advertisers: "Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?"

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 68.

• "I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good manners."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 53.

• "I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I have a previous engagement with another client; successful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 52.

AGENCY HIRING

• "People don't buy from clowns."

- Claude Hopkins, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books, p. 103.

• "If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants."

- David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books, p. 47.

• "I'd like to ask each and every one of you how many remarkable people, or people of any kind, you personally have discovered or brought in in the last year. That's a job that I think is too vital for you to delegate... what kind of people should you discover and hire? Well, policemen and tobacco farmers, not MBAs! Clients have got MBAs! Hire the kind of people clients don't have and wouldn't dream of hiring. Don't go to the clients with a lot of guys who are like theirs, only not so good -- you have to remember that clients can afford to pay far more than we can for MBAs."

- David Ogilvy, from a speech to O&M Worldwide Meeting, 1989.

• "I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 42.

• "The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 42.

ART & ARTISTS

·         "Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by the beauty of the picture - and forget that merchandise must be sold."

- James Randolph Adams, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels & Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969, Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 12.

• "Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed . . . but dull?"

- William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

• "Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising."

- David Ogilvy, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels & Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969, Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 15.

ATTENTION

·         "If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic."

- William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

• "If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, p. 26.

• "Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up beneath his notice."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 64.

• "You have only 30 seconds [in a TV commercial]. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull ... When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire."

- David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books, p. 111.

• "The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever's wrong in the merchant's business. If the truth isn't tellable, fix it so it is. That is about all there is to it."

- John E. Powers, 19th Century copywriter, quoted in Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (1984), New York: William Morrow and Company, p. 28.

AWARDS

·         "In the past, we have had a strategy, but our agencies didn't stick to it. But they did make good commercials and they did win awards. This may surprise you, though. I don't care about awards; I want to sell product."

- James W. Harralson, CEO of Royal Crown Cola Company, quoted in Philip Dougherty, "Advertising," The New York Times, April 5, 1988, p. D23.

BELIEF

·         "The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 61.

• "If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the popular culture that advertisements are silly."

- Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 227.

BILLBOARDS

·         "I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all."

- Ogden Nash (1959), quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.

 

·         "I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 18.

 

·         "American advertisers rely on 'essentially illogical' approaches to determine their advertising budgets."

- Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 17.

 

·         "Experience has taught me that advertisers get the best results when they pay their agency a flat fee. . . . It is unrealistic to expect your agency to be impartial when its vested interest lies wholly in the direction of increasing your commissionable advertising."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 71.

• "Make sure that your agency makes a profit. Your account competes with all the other accounts in your agency. If it is unprofitable, it is unlikely that the management of the agency will assign their best men to work on it. And sooner or later they will cast about for a profitable account to replace yours."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 71.

COMMITTEES

·         "When you try to formalize or socialize creative activity, the only sure result is commercial constipation . . . . The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups."

- Charles Browder (1957), president of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 82.

• "Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 70.

COMMUNICATION

·         "Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it."

- William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

• "The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly."

- William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

• "Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it.'"

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 50.

• "Words give you a medium, if you will, and make your message part of the human thought process. Words are as portable as the human being who hears them."

- James J. Jordan, Jr., quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 107.

• "I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information."

- David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books, p. 7.

• "As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise."

- George Will (1976), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 71.

CONSUMERISM

·         "Consumerism is an antipollution drive in relation to the toxic areas of advertising."

- Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord, 1974, New York: Anchor Books, p. 78.

CONSUMERS

·         "The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced."

- Daniel J. Boorstin, U.S. historian, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.

• "If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 19.

• "Advertising is found in societies which have passed the point of satisfying the basic animal needs."

- Marion Harper, Jr. (1960), president of McCann-Erickson, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.

• "The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine, p. 84.

• "The novice at advertising frequently gives the public credit for too much intelligence."

- Printers' Ink, September 2 (1983), quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 163.

CONTENT

·         "Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you. Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before."

- William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

• "There is no such thing as 'soft sell' and 'hard sell.' There is only 'smart sell' and 'stupid sell.'"

- Charles Browder (1958), president of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 83.

• "That is the kind of ad I like. Facts, facts, facts."

- Samuel Goldwyn, U.S. film producer, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.

• "The right name is an advertisement in itself."

- Claude C. Hopkins, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 12.

• "Advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news it is worthless."

- Adolph S. Ochs (1958), quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.

• "What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it."

- David Ogilvy, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 63.

• "What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 81.

• "The headline is the 'ticket on the meat.' Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 92.

• "On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 92.

• "I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I didn't know what it meant myself."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 99.

• "I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive."

- David Ogilvy, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, p. 85.

• "Bragging is advertising'"

- Jef I. Richards (1997), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

COPYWRITING

·         "I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than it is to write a good ad."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 27.

• "I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 53.

• "I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes . . . ."

- Philip Dusenberry, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 56.

• "A writer should be joyous, an optimist . . . Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer."

- George Gribbin, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, p. 48.

• "I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement . . . . It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public."

- Aldous Huxley (1923), British author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.

• "The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy."

- Louis Kronenberger (1954), quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.

• "Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?"

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 78.

• "I don't know the rules of grammar. . . . If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular."

- David Ogilvy, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, p. 93.

• "Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write."

- David Ogilvy, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, p. 70.

• "I suspect that there is no other single profession that does more to contribute to our annoying linguistic convolutions than advertising, unless it's politics."

- Jef Richards (1997), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

COST

• "It is very likely that many firms spend more on advertising than, for their own best interests, they should."

- Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 18.

 

CRITICS

• "In essence, the motivation of the attacks on advertising is hostility toward capitalism and egoism."

- Jerry Kirkpatrick, "A Philosophic Defense of Advertising," Journal of Advertising, 1986, vol. 15(2).

• "The list of sins committed by advertising is limited only by the creativity of its critics."

- Jerry Kirkpatrick, "A Philosophic Defense of Advertising," Journal of Advertising, 1986, vol. 15(2).

• "I wish all consumers were as gullible as advertising's biggest critics. Anyone who believes advertising is that powerful will believe almost anything."

- Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

• "Advertising is much less powerful than advertisers and critics of advertising claim, and advertising agencies are stabbing in the dark much more than they are practicing precision microsurgery on the public consciousness."

- Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. xiii.

• "Most criticism of advertising is written in ignorance of what actually happens inside these agencies."

- Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 45.

ECONOMICS

• "To think that the effects of advertising, such a potent environment in any industrialized country, could be limited to economics, is as absurd as assuming that the effects of a hot climate upon a culture could be limited to tropical diseases."

- William Kuhns, Waysteps to Eden: Ads and Commercials (1970), New York: Herder and Herder.

• "Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."

- Sinclair Lewis (1943), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 70.

EFFECTS

• "Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production."

- Sir Winston Churchill, quoted in David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 133.

• "There is something of a parasitic quality about advertising. It feeds on the organisms of noncommercial culture - the culture's past and present, ideology and myths, politics and customs, art and architecture, literature and music, and even its religions . . . . For example, women are commodified to sell everything from cars to colognes . . . . Advertising thus pimps its products."

- Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, "Commerce & Communication," 71 Texas Law Review 697 (1993), p. 709-10.

 

• "[T]he business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds."

- Marshall McLuhan, "The Age of Advertising," Commonweal, (1953), 58, p. 557.

• "I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product."

- David Ogilvy, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels & Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969, Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 14.

• "Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."

- Mark Twain, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.

EVIL

·         Advertising is "an evil service."

- Aneurin Bevan, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.

• "Advertising is an instrument in the hands of the people who use it. If evil men use advertising for base purposes, then evil can result. If honest men use advertising to sell an honest product with honest enthusiasm, then positive good for our kind of capitalistic society can result."

- John W. Crawford, communications professor, quoted in Samm Sinclair Baker, The Permissible Lie: The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, p. 180.

• History will see advertising "as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that."

- Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.

• "Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things."

- David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), New York: Vintage Books, p. 207.

• Young people are "threatened . . . by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire."

- Pope John Paul II, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.

• I can not "think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil."

- Arnold Toynbee, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.

SPEECH / CENSORSHIP

• "Advertisers, not governments, are the primary censors of media content in the United States today."

- C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press, 1994, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 99.

• "It is not easy to describe the present position of legal opinion on advertising and free speech. Only a poet can capture the essence of chaos."

- R. H. Coase, "Advertising and Free Speech," 6 Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1977), p. 32.

• "Commercial speech is like obscenity ... we can't seem to define it, but we know it when we see it."

- Jef Richards (1996), Associate Professor of Advertising, The University of Texas at Austin.

• "The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?"

- Calvin Trillin (1986), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 71.

FUN

• "Fun without sell gets nowhere but sell without fun tends to become obnoxious."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 8.

• "I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on."

- Jerry Della Famina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor (1971), New York: Pocket Books, p. 256.

FUTURE

• "[T]here will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things."

- William Dean Howells, quoted in Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, 1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 286.

• "Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities."

- Marshall McLuhan

• "The Death of Advertising? I think that's in the book of Revelation. It's the day when people everywhere become satisfied with their weight, their hair, their skin, their wardrobe, and their aroma."

- Jef I. Richards (1999), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.

• "Advertising is on its deathbed and it will not survive long, having contracted a fatal case of new technology."

- Roland T. Rust and Richard W. Oliver, "The Death of Advertising," Journal of Advertising, 1994, 23(4): 71-77, p. 76.

HONESTY

• "The first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise . . . and cultivate the delightfully vague."

- John Crosby (1947), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 70.

• "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."

- Thomas Jefferson, quoted in H.L. Menchen, A New Dictionary of Quotations, 1946, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 17.

• "Folks with their wits about them knew that advertisements were just a pack of lies - you had only to look at the claims of patent medicines!"

- Frances Parkinson Keyes, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 70.

• "It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 57.

• "There is one category of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections."

- David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), New York: Vintage Books, p. 209.

• "There is a huge difference between journalism and advertising. Journalism aspires to truth. Advertising is regulated for truth. I'll put the accuracy of the average ad in this country up against the average news story any time."

- Jef I. Richards (1999), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

IDEA / CONCEPT

• "I have learned to respect ideas, wherever they come from. Often they come from clients. Account executives often have big creative ideas, regardless of what some writers think."

- Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 52.

• "Make the layouts rough and the ideas fancy."

- Stavros Cosmopulos, of Cosmopulos, Crowley & Daly, Inc.

• "Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. Don't forget that, all of you who don't have them."

- John Elliott, Jr., quoted in Leonard Safir and William Safire, Good Advice, 1982, New York: Times Books, p. 7.

• "If an ad campaign is built around a weak idea - or as is so often the case, no idea at all - I don't give a damn how good the execution is, it's going to fail."

- Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 165.

• "If you have a good selling idea, your secretary can write your ad for you."

- Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 16.

IMAGE

• "Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it's Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniel's. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images."

- David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books, p. 15.

• "In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope."

- Charles Revson, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 2.

INSECURITY / UNHAPPINESS

• "Advertising promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to improve their economic status."

- Ralph Starr Butler, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels & Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969, Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 13.

• "Next to Christianity, advertising is the greatest force in the world. And I say that without sacrilege or disrespect. Advertising makes people discontented. It makes them want things they don't have. Without discontent, there is no progress, no achievement."

- Ray Locke, former owner of Tracy-Locke Co., quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 78.

• "It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have."

- B. Earl Puckett, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 71.

• "Buy me and you will overcome the anxieties I have just reminded you of."

- Michael Schudson, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry, The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, p. 18.

LAW & REGULATION

• "There are quite a few votes to be won by saying we will tax advertising or stop it."

- Barry Day, Vice Chairman of McCann-Erickson, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 125.

• "Commercials on television are similar to sex and taxes; the more talk there is about them, the less likely they are to be curbed."

- Jack Gould (1963), quoted in Bruce Bohle, The Home Book of American Quotations, 1967, New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, p. 5.

• "The law requires a paper towel ad to be scrupulously honest, but allows political candidates to lie without reproach. What's wrong with this picture?"

- Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

• "Advertising is speech. It's regulated because it's often effective speech."

- Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

LOGIC

• "The illogical man is what advertising is after. This is why advertising is so anti-rational; this is why it aims at uprooting not only the rationality of man but his common sense."

- Henryk Skolimowski, "The Semantic Environment in the Age of Advertising," in Thomas H. Ohlbren and L. M. Berk, The New Languages: A Rhetorical Approach to the Mass Media and Popular Culture (1977), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, p. 95.

MEDIA

• "The buying of time or space is not the taking out of a hunting license on someone else's private preserve but is the renting of a stage on which we may perform."

- Howard Gossage, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 188.

MEDIA SUPPORT

• "A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising."

- James Collins (1907), ad executive, quoted in Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, 1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 201.

• "The role of the publisher . . . has changed from seller of a product to consumers, to gatherer of consumer for advertisers . . . The role of the reader changes from sovereign consumer to advertiser bait."

- Vincent P. Norris, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 377.

• "It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye."

- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 138.

PRACTICE & PRACTITIONERS

• "The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference."

- Fred Allen, American comic

• "To me, an advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission. A vice-president in an advertising agency is a 'molehill man.' A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 A.M. and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 P.M. to make this molehill into a mountain."

- Fred Allen, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 69.

• "It used to be that a fellow went on the police force when everything else failed, but today he goes in the advertising game."

- Frank McKinney Hubbard, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels & Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969, Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 14.

PRODUCT

• "A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad."

- William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

RESPONSIBILITY

• "To explain responsibility to advertising men is like trying to convince an eight-year-old that sexual intercourse is more fun than a chocolate ice cream cone."

- Howard Luck Gossage, quoted in The Book of Gossage (1995), Chicago, IL: The Copy Workshop, p. 29.

• "Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle."

- Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell? (1964), New York: Lippincott, p. 31.

 

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

~ Archibishop of Canterbury ~

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.

~ Bruce Barton ~

An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

~ Fred A. Allen ~

Watteau is no less an artist for having painted a fascia board while Sainsbury's is no less effective a business for producing advertisements which entertain and educate instead of condescending and exploiting.

~ Stephen Bayley ~

Telling lies does not work in advertising.

~ Tim Bell ~

We read advertisements to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready -- even eager -- to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin ~

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

~ William Bernbach ~

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

~ Raymond Chandler ~

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.

~ Bill Cosby ~

Sanely applied advertising could remake the world.

~ Stuart Chase ~

I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.

~ Leo Burnett ~

Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

~ Jerry Della Femina ~

The more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement's chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the ad increases.

~ Dr. Charles Edwards ~

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

~ Norman Douglas ~

Be comfortable with who you are', reads the headline on the Hush Puppies poster. Are they mad? If people were comfortable with who they were, they'd never buy any products except the ones they needed, and then where would the advertising industry be?

~ Mark Edwards ~

That's the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts.

~ Samuel Goldwyn ~

How about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? French fries.

~ James French ~

No agency is better than its account executives.

~ Morris Hite ~

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

~ Zelda Fitzgerald ~

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

~ John Lahr ~

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

~ Stephen B. Leacock ~

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

~ Sinclair Lewis ~

The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.

~ Wyndham Lewis ~

The right name is an advertisement in itself.

~ Claude Hopkins ~

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

~ Marshall Mcluhan ~

Good wine needs no bush, and perhaps products that people really want need no hard-sell or soft-sell TV push. Why not? Look at pot.

~ Ogden Nash ~

What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.

~ David Ogilvy ~

Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

~ John Enoch Powell ~

Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for millions.

~ William Allen White ~

 

 

 

 

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising?  Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.  ~Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 1964

 

Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease.  ~Author Unknown

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.  ~Stephen Butler Leacock, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political Quotations, 1982

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read.  You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife.  Don't tell them to mine.  ~David Ogilvy


Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.  ~Marshall McLuhan, introduction to Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction: Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974


As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.  ~George Will, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations


Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it.  ~Will Rogers


It used to be that people needed products to survive.  Now products need people to survive.  ~Nicholas Johnson


Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.  ~George Orwell


Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths.  ~Edgar A. Shoaff


Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.  ~Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell?, 1964


It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have.  ~B. Earl Puckett, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992


I have... had a disturbing dream in which I break through a cave wall near Nag Hammadi and discover urns full of ancient Coptic scrolls.  As I unfurl the first scroll, a subscription card to some Gnostic exercise magazine flutters out.  ~Colin McEnroe


Our society's values are being corrupted by advertising's insistence on the equation:  Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness.  ~John Fisher, The Plot to Make You Buy, 1968


History will see advertising "as one of the real evil things of our time.  It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that."  ~Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988


 

Don't tell my mother I work in an advertising agency - she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.  ~Jacques Seguela


The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.  ~Louis Kronenberger

What somebody somewhere wants to suppress. All the rest is advertising -- Lord Northcliffe

 

 

Journalism

 

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.
--Alexander Cockburn

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 republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic (corrupt) press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.
--Joseph Pulitzer

 

 
Without criticism and reliable and intellectual reporting, the government cannot govern.
--Walter Lippmann, address at the International Press Institute Assembly, London, May 27, 1965

Responsible journalism is journalism responsible in the last analysis to the editor's own conviction of what, whether interesting or only important, is in the public's interest.
--Lippmann

As the free press develops, the paramount point is whether the journalist, like the scientist or scholar, puts truth in the first place or the second.
--Lippmann

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

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read:  "President Can't Swim."  ~Lyndon B. Johnson

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Col. Edward Carrington, Jan. 16, 1787

 

 

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
--Mark Twain

 

Journalism consists largely in saying -Lord Jones died- to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
--G.K. Chesterton

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
--A.J. Liebling

 

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

 

The First Law of Journalism: To confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.
--Alexander Cockburn

Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.
--Frank Zappa

 

This is not reality, this is journalism.

Journalism is reality, Myrnalism is the Twilight Zone.

Journalists don't court the muse - they've got deadlines.

"The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money."
-A. J. Liebling, The Press, 1961

Slang is a deliberate invention by professional smart-alecks--college boys, reporters, newspaper men, and other dubious characters.
--H.L. Mencken

Cronyism is the curse of journalism. After many years I have reached the firm conclusion that it is impossible for any objective newspaperman to be a friend of a President. -- Garry Wills, "Lead Time: A Journalist's Education," Doubleday & Co., 1983

 

 

Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.  ~Rebecca West

Journalism is literature in a hurry.  ~Matthew Arnold

Journalists cover words and delude themselves into thinking they have committed journalism.  ~Hedrick Smith

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, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891

 

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country."
-Learned Hand Memorial service for Justice Brandeis, December 21, 1942

 

"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."
-G. K. Chesterton, "On the Cryptic and the Elliptic", 1908

 

 

Journalism is one of the last professions where it's advantageous to know a little bit of everything and a lot about nothing.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you.

If you want to be misinformed about world events, buy a newspaper.
--Henry Miller

 

"Surely the glory of journalism is its transience."
-Malcolm Muggeridge, The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966

 

"The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform."
-George Steiner, Real Presences, 1989

 

Good journalists do it in time to make deadlines.

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

 

All the news that's fit to print.
--Adolph Ochs

 

 

Journalism, according to G.K. Chesterton, ``largely consists of saying `Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.''

·         A free press is one that prints a dictator's speech but doesn't have to. -- Laurence J. Peter

• Free speech is about as good a cause as the world has ever known. But, like the poor, it is always with us and gets shoved aside in favor of things which seem at some given moment more vital. . . . Everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground. -- Heywood Broun (1888-1939), reporter and founder of The Newspaper Guild
• MILNE: No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.

§  RUTH: I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand.

• Tom Stoppard, Night and Day, Act I

 

• As a profession we haven't done a good job of putting our own story over. We have sold everything else except the great contribution newspapers have made to national and local well-being. Newspapers have been too much on the defensive, too apologetic, if you please. You can hardly go to a newspaper meeting or hear a speech on newspapers without much of the oratory turning around the dangers of losing the cherished (First Amendment) freedom. -- Roy A. Robert, president of the Kansas City Star, in a 1956 speech quoted in ``The Responsibility of the Press,'' Fleet Publishing Corp., 1966

Where the press is under strict and efficient control, literacy can become a weapon for the support of a universal tyranny. -- George S. Counts

 

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. -- Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960)

    ``Out There'' -- wherever that is -- people may be smiling and humming . . . but the world according to journalism is, on the contrary, a surpassingly bleak place. A Martian reading about it might in fact suppose America to be composed entirely of abused minorities living in squalid and sadistically-run state mental hospitals, except for a small elite of venal businessmen and county commissioners who are profiting from the unfortunates' misery. -- Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post, quoted in ``The Media Elite,'' by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda S. Lichter; Communication Arts Books, 1990

 

You can crush a man with journalism. -- William Randolph Hearst

  The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness. -- Eric Sevareid, 1959

  Were he still broadcasting, Walter Cronkite might end his newscast with ``and that's the way we say it is'' to better represent the tenor of today's news media. -- Connect magazine (Spring 1996)

 

 

  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, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, 1969

 

 

If God himself reached down into the muck and mire, he could not raise a journalist up to the depths of degradation!
--The old country doctor in
Nothing Sacred
a 1937 journalism film written by Ben Hecht

The four pillars of wisdom that support journalistic endeavors are: lies, stupidity, money-grubbing, and ethical irresponsibility.
--Marlon Brando
June 19, 1995
to reporters questioning him about the dissent of the set of Divine Rapture
Production stopped on July 24, 1995

Journalists should not be so distant that all they can hear are shouts, nor so close that they become more conspirators than critics. -- Walter Lippman (1889-1974), columnist for the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post

The things that bother a press about a President will ultimately bother the country. -- David Halberstam

In the hierarchy of predatory animals, Journalists are the carrion eaters.
--Jacques Welter
in November, 1984 on the occasion of his changing professions from
Journalism to the computer industry.

Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology--and, what's more, the population will hardly protest the extinction.
--David Remnick
The New Yorker, Jan. 29, 1996

 

Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.
--Gonzo Journalist Hunter Thompson
USA Today, March 26, 1998

 

"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."
-G. K. Chesterton, "On the Cryptic and the Elliptic", 1908

 

"The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform."
-George Steiner, Real Presences, 1989

"The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country."
-Learned Hand Memorial service for Justice Brandeis, December 21, 1942

  There is but one way for a newspaperman to look at a politician and that is down. -- Frank H. Simonds (1878-1936)

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
--Gandhi

"The press is the enemy" -Richard Nixon, 1969

A Journalist is a machine that converts coffee into copy.
-- Michael Ryan Elgan (1961-?)
Managing Editor, Editor, Windows Magazine
1992-1999 1993

"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." Marshall McLuhan

A curious journalist-those words should be redundant, but, alas, I have to tell you they are not.
--Charles Peters
Washington Monthly, July/August 1995

A Journalist is a machine that converts coffee into copy.
— Michael Ryan Elgan (1961-?)

Managing Editor, Editor, Windows Magazine
1992-1999

 

"The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments." -George Mason, Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776

 

 "The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state" —John Adams

"Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper." -Mother Teresa, 1990

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost" -Thomas Jefferson, 1

 

"The theory of a free press is that the truth will emerge from reporting and free discussion, that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -Walter Lippmann

 Paddock
"Go to press! It's a damn sight better to give 'em a hell of a lot of something than a hell of a lot of nothing." -William Rockhill Nelson

"When journalese was at its rifest the Ministry of Health was established - possibly a coincidence." - John Galsworthy, July 1924.

 

"Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Is Dead'to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive." - G K Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914.

 

 

 "The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram." - Don Marquis.

 

"Journalism is literature in a hurry." Matthew Arnold

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

 "With regard to modern journalists, they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public." - Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891.

 

"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grapsed at once." - Cyril Connolly, 1938, Enemies of Promise.

 

 

 

"The life of a journalist is poor, basty, brutish and short. So is his style." - Stella Gibbons, 1932, Cold Comfort Farm.

 

"Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write." - Karl Kraus, 1919, In Hollow Heads.                                                                                                                       

 

 

"Cronyism is the curse of journalism. After many years I have reached the firm conclusion that it is impossible for any objective newspaperman to be a friend of a President." - Walter Lippmann.

 

"Writing good editorials is chiefly telling the people what they think, not what you think." Arthur Brisbane

 

"Journalism kills you, but it keeps you alive as long as you're doing it." Horace Greeley

 

"The press of this countrty is now and always has been so thoroughly dominated by the wealthy few of the country that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the people the correct information concerning political, economical, and social subjects which it is necessary that the mass of people shall have, in order that they shall vote and in all ways act in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force and chicanery of the ruling and employing class." E. W. Scripps

 

"A journalist is a reporter out of a job." -Mark Twain

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history" -Donald Graham

"Our aim is to tell the truth, fear God and make money." -Stuart

 

"Journalism is not a profession, but a mission." Benito Mussolini

 

"Journalists should be people in whom there is at least a flicker of hope." Sen. Paul Simon

 

"In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation." - Anthony Sampson, 1965, The Anatomy of Britain.

 

"Journalists are the midwives of history." James Plath

 

"The essence of the free press is the reliable, reasonable and moral nature of freedom." Karl Marx

 

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." Rudyard Kipling

 

"All journalism is subjective . . . fairness, not some unattainable notion of 'objectivity,' is the reporter's obligation." Carl Bernstein

 

"King over all the children of pride Is the Press—The Press—The Press!" Rudyard Kipling

 

"The American press is . . . kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man." Theodore Dreiser

 

"The press was to serve the governed, not the governors." Justice Hugo L. Black

 

"I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it—a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures." Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

 

"The press has no better friend than I am, no one who is more ready to acknowledge . . . its tremendous power for both good and evil." Abraham Lincoln

 

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Thomas Jefferson (1786)

 

Some of the best, and some of the worst, journalism in the USA is practiced in the nation's capital. But the pompousness east of the Potomac is so prevalent that those who practice both the best and the worst often are not aware of the difference.

 

·         A profession whose business it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand. -- Lord Northcliffe (speaking of ``journalism'')

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

Franklin Jones

 

In the hierarchy of predatory animals, Journalists are the carrion eaters.
—Jacques Welter in November, 1984 on the occasion of his changing professions from Journalism to the computer industry.

 

Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.
—Gonzo Journalist Hunter Thompson
USA Today, March 26, 1998

 

"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, [journalism] keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
-Oscar Wilde

The only qualities for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability. . . . The capacity to steal other people's ideas and phrases -- that one about ratlike cunning was invented by my colleague Murray Sayle -- is also invaluable. -- Nicholas Tomalin, Sunday Times Magazine, Oct. 26, 1969

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read. -- Frank Zappa (1940-1993)

In the security of their domination of the market, newspaper publishers have been converting newspapers into agencies for merchants. In the words of Harold Evans, former editor of the London Sunday Times.

 

 The challenge of American newspapers ``is not to stay in business -- it is to stay in journalism.'' -- Ben Bagdakian, ``The Media Monopoly,'' Beacon Press, 1987

If God himself reached down into the muck and mire, he could not raise a journalist up to the depths of degradation!
—The old country doctor in
Nothing Sacred
a 1937 journalism film written by Ben Hecht

 

NEWS

 

 

"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, Skyline, 1961

"No news at 4:30 a.m. is good."
-Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary, 1970

 

 

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

 

 

 

When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news.
--Charles Anderson Dana

Eschew Obfuscation. (go ahead, look them both up!)

Nothing in fine print is ever good news.
--Andy Rooney

 

If you don't like the news, go out and make some.

Anyone nitpicking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
--Alvin Toffler

 

A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.  ~Henry Fielding

 

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 there were.  ~David Brinkley

"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, Skyline, 1961

 

"No news at 4:30 a.m. is good."
-Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary, 1970

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

 

It has been my experience that what most viewers and readers are most unhappy about is not that journalists slant the news, but that we don't slant it their way. -- Don Hewitt, executive producer of ``60 Minutes,'' in the Wall Street Journal (12-18-96)

 

The guiding ideological principles of most American newsrooms are entropy, chaos, procrastination and lunch. -- Renee Loth of the Boston Globe

 

 

News that incessantly and unjustifiably labels political leaders as insincere and inept fosters mistrust on the part of the public, and makes it harder for those in authority to provide the leadership that is required if government is to work effectively. -- Thomas E. Patterson, Syracuse University political scientist, in his book ``Out of Order''

 

Television news provides no more than a kind of child's picture book of almost wordless moving images calculated to stir the emotions rather than the intellect. -- Ronald Payne, in The European, Sept. 1996

 

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the ``bare bones'' of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring. -- Dave Barry

 

"An ambassador is a man of virtue sent to lie abroad for his country; a news-writer is a man without virtue who lies at home for himself."

Solomon Short

 

News is the history in hurry     George H Morris

 

news is the element of nutrition for human society.    Defo

 

"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, Skyline, 1961

"No news at 4:30 a.m. is good."
-Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary, 1970

"A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom -- it's gone."
-Edward R. Murrow News Summaries, December 31, 1955

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

"This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news" -William Shakespeare

 

"News is anything you find out today that you didn't know before." -Turner Catledge

"When a dog bites a man that is not news. But when a man bites a dog, that is news." -Charles A. Dana, New York Sun publisher,1882

 

 

"A newswriter is a man without virtue, who lies at home for his own profit." Samuel Johnson

"Real news is bad news." Marshall McLuhan

 

"News is the first rough draft of history." Ben Bradlee

 

The vital measure of a newspaper is not its size but its spirit -- that is its responsibility to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.
--Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 1948

 

There is a lot of angst out there in the newsrooms of America about our future but it is ill-founded. Our future is very strong as far as I'm concerned. No new medium has ever replaced an existing medium in the history of mass communications. Those who say newspapers are dinosaurs are wrong; newspapers still have a very important role to play in a democratic society. -- William B. Ketter, editor, the Quincy (Mass.) Patriot Ledger, and former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

 

News is . . .

What lies between the ads. -- Dale Boller

The first rough draft of history. -- Ben Bradlee

Whatever sells newspapers (or the electronic equivalent), i.e., something bad -- preferably something bad that scares the hell out of the populace. -- Carl Porter, Knoxville

What Walter Cronkite used to read to us every night. -- Malcolm (malcolm@netusa1.net)

Information with high blood pressure. -- Submitted by Dale Boller, with apologies to Arthur Baer.

"Film at 11," isn't it? -- Dale Boller

Everything journalists can't stuff the trash can (the real one) with. -- Luiz Carlos de Assis, Jornaldodia, Sao Paulo, Brazil

What protrudes from the ordinary. -- Walter Lippman

The departure from normal. -- Leo Rosten

What interests a good newspaperman. -- Gerald Johnson, Baltimore Sun

What one's colleagues have defined as news. -- Douglass Cater

What I say it is. It's something worth knowing by my standards. -- David Brinkley

Anything that will make people talk. -- Charles A. Dana, New York Sun

Anything that makes the reader say "Gee whiz!" -- Arthur McEwen, San Francisco Examiner

What a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. -- Corker, a character in Evelyn Waugh's wonderful newspaper novel, "Scoop"

Women, wampum and wrongdoing. -- Stanley Walker, New York Times

Things that people don't want to be known. -- Nicholas Tomlin, London Sunday Times

 

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please." Mark Twain

 

 

 

NEWSPAPERS

 

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper." - George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, 1968.

Lady Middleton... exerted herself to ask Mr. Palmer if there was any news in the paper.
"No, none at all," he replied, and read on.

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.-- Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850) JANE AUSTEN, Sense and Sensibility, 1.19, 1811
 

Malcolm Muggeridge once said that Mother Teresa never reads the newspaper, never listens to the radio and never watches television, so she's got a pretty good idea of what's going on in the world. -- Martin Wroe

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.  ~Ben Hecht

 

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

 

People everywhere confuse
What they read in newspapers with news.
~A.J. Liebling, The New Yorker, 7 April 1956

That ephemeral sheet,... the newspaper, is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.  ~E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal, July 1858

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Col. Edward Carrington, Jan. 16, 1787
"There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'"
-Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, 1962

 

 

"The window to the world can be covered by a newspaper."
-Stanislaw Lec, Unkempt Thoughts, 1962

 

"You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgements about what is going on."
-Harry S Truman, Mr. Citizen, 1960

 It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell.
--Chicago Sun Timeseditorial, 1861

 There are roughly 8,000 weekly newspapers in the United States and 1,700 dailies. At a guess, one in ten of either category fulfills its responsibility to print the news and raise hell. . . . -- Everett T. Rattray, editor of the East Hampton (N.Y.) Star, in ``The Responsibility of the Press,'' Fleet Publishing Corp., 1966   

If you want to be misinformed about world events, buy a newspaper.
--Henry Miller

If a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when The New York Times
prints it, it's a sociological study. -- Adolph S. Ochs (1858-1935), publisher of The New York Times

 

A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.  ~Henry Fielding

I got something out of working on a newspaper. I learned that I had to wind things up. I used to leave things half-written, you know. But things couldn't go in the paper unless they were rounded out.
--Robert Frost

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else. -- H.L. Mencken, "Prejudices," 1922

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers. -- Tom Stoppard, The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968)

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. -- Norman Mailer, in Esquire, June 1960

 

"A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly.  Its primary office is the gathering of news.   At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted.  Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong.  Comment is free, but facts are sacred."  
C.P. Scott, (Editor of the Manchester Guardian 1872 - 1929)

A newspaper cannot really congratulate itself on having got at the facts impartially when it has quoted at length from two uninformed idiots on opposing sides of an issue. -- A.J. Wiggins, editor-publisher of the Ellsworth (Maine) American

If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own. -- James Fenimore Cooper

When our daughter Jan's third grade teacher at Allen Creek School in Rochester, New York, asked her to tell the class what her father did for a living, she said, ``He reads newspapers.''

 

The advertisements in a newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.

HENRY WARD BEECHER, "The Press," Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit,

"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, "Mr. Dooley's Opinions", 1900

 

"Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Newspapers... help you forget the previous day.

ELIAS CANETTI, 1978, The Secret Heart of the Clock

 

I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success but as soon as [honeyed] words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, journal, 29 September 1838

 

To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it. -- Fred Allen

The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don't print matter a lot.

KATHARINE GRAHAM (Washington Post publisher), in Donald L. Barlett, "All the Publisher's Presidents," New York Times Book Review, 28 February 1993

 

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.  ~James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982

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

ERWIN KNOLL (Progressive editor), "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy," in Paul Dickson, comp., The Official Rules, p. 138, 1978

 

Whenever I was upset by something in the papers, [Jack] always told me to be more tolerant, like a horse flicking away flies in the summer.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS, in Ralph G. Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 11, 1983

"I'm with you on the free press.  It's the newspapers I can't stand." 
Tom Stoppard

Violence. Sex.... Money. Kids. Animals.

MIKE PEARL (New York Post editor), on what makes a tabloid a tabloid, in "Perspectives," Newsweek, 29 June 1987

 

Of all things that Lindbergh's great feat demonstrated, the greatest was to show us that a person could still get the entire front pages without murdering anybody.

WILL ROGERS, after the first solo-flight across the Atlantic by Charles A. Lindbergh, 22 May 1927, The Autobiography of Will Rogers, ed. Donald Day, 1949

 

Nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment.

ALEXIS de TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America, 2.2.6, 1840, tr. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen, 1862

Headlines twice the size of events.

JOHN GALSWORTHY, Over the River, 27, 1933

 

The duty of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

ANONYMOUS, in H. L. Mencken, comp., A New Dictionary of Quotations, p. 852, 1942

 

If the Government and the Officers of it are to be the constant theme for Newspaper abuse, and this too without condescending to investigate the motives or the facts, it will be impossible, I conceive, for any man living to manage the helm or to keep the machine together.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter (marked "private") to Attorney General Edmund Randolph, 26 August 1792

On behalf of the newspaper industry (new, cost-cutting motto: ``All the News That'') I wish to announce some changes we're making to serve you better. When I say ``serve you better,'' I mean ``increase our profits.'' We newspapers are very big on profits these days. We're a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors.
--Dave Barry
Miami Herald, May 20, 2001

The newspapers are the ruling power. What Congress does is an afterclap.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, journal, 17 November 1850

"Newspapers always excite curiosity.  No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment." 
Charles Lamb

 

A newspaper is not the place to go to see people actually earning a living, though journalists like to pretend they never stop sweating over a hot typewriter. It is much more like a brothel - short, rushed bouts of really enjoyable activity interspersed with long lazy stretches of gossip, boasting, flirtation, drinking, telephoning, strolling about the corridors sitting on the corner of desks, planning to start everything tomorrow. Each of the inmates has a little specialty to please the customers. The highest paid ones perform only by appointment; the poorest take on anybody, The editors are like madams - soothing, flattering, disciplining their naughty, temperamental staff, but rarely obliged to satisfy the clients personally between the printed sheets.
--from a UPI Washington Bureau Manager

 

Give light and the people will find their own way,

SCRIPPS-HOWARD NEWSPAPERS, motto

I buy newspapers to make money to buy more newspapers to make more money. As for editorial content, that's the stuff you separate the ads with.

ROY HERBERT THOMSON (Canadian-born British publisher, 1894-1976), in Tom Wicker, On Press, 9, 1978

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
--Norman Mailer

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
--Ben Hecht

It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
--Russell Baker
The New York Times, August 6, 1996

"Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."
Thomas Jefferson

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a national talking to itself."  
Arthur Miller

 

The newspaper is the moring force of curent history.  Cutlip and centre

 

"The duty of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" –adage

 

"No wonder the newspaper is rotten. We need more drunkards." -Actor Edward G. Robinson in "Five Star Final", 1931

 

"Most people don't think for themselves. They lean on newspapers." -Thomas J. Pendergast, 1992

If you want to know what is really going on in the world, read the business section. The rest is just so much gossip.

ANONYMOUS (AMERICAN), in M. Hunter Larsen (Petaluma, California), letter to San Francisco Chronicle, 20 December 1997

Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.

ANONYMOUS (AMERICAN)

"Any person that don't read at least one well-written country newspaper is not truly informed." -Will Rogers

"A newspaper is an adviser who does not require to be sought, but who comes of his own accord, and talks to you briefly every day of the common wealth, without distracting you from your private affairs." -Alexis De Tocqueville

 

"I'm with you on the free press.  It's the newspapers I can't stand." 
Tom Stoppard

"The brilliant mission of the newspaper...is to be the high priest of history, the vitalizer of society, the world's great informer..." -Samuel Bowles

 

"Perhaps the best thing which can be said about newspapers in the United States is that they are in chronic disagreement with each other. That is what is meant by a free press." -Jim Bishop

"I read the newspapers avidly.  It is my one form of continuous fiction." 
Aneurin Bevan

"The great art of running a newspaper is the art of guessing where hell is liable to break loose next." -Joseph B. McCullagh

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.  ~Charles Baudelaire

"Count the day lost when your newspaper...has not done something to benefit the community it serves." -Oscar S. Stauffer

"A newspaper is a mirror reflecting the public, a mirror more or less defective, but still a mirror." -Arthur Brisbane

"Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." -Napolean Bonaparte

"Newspapers tell beforehand what is going to happen - maybe." -Carl Sandburg

 

"People everywhere confuse what they read in the newspapers with news." -A. J. Liebling, 1956.

"A good newspaper...is a nation talking to itself." -Arthur Miller, 1961

 

"You know what people use newspapers for? They roll them up and swat their puppies for wetting on the rug; they spread them on the floor when they're painting the walls; they wrap fish in them; they shred them up and pack their two-bit china in them when they move; or else they pile up in the garage until an inspector declares them a fire hazard! But this also happens to be a couple of more things!" -Actor Robert Conrad in the film, "30"

.

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

 

"We live under a government of men and morning newspapers." 
Wendell Phillips

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

THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807

"Let me make the newspaper, and I care not who makes the religion and the laws." -Wendell Phillips

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time. 

THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807

"All the news that's fit to print." 
Adoph Simon Ochs (motto of the New York Times from 1896)

 "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." - A.J. Liebling, New Yorker, 1956.

 

 "You should always believe all you read in the newspapers, as this makes them more interesting." - Rose Macaulay, A Casual Commentary, 1925.

 

 

 

"(of a newspaper) It was a hostile broth of black print." - Saul Bellow, 1961, Herzog.

 

"They used to say a man's life was a closed book. So it is but it's an open newspaper." - Finlay Peter Dunne, 1902.

 

Newspapermen meet many interesting people, most of them other newspapermen. -- Frederick C. Klein, in the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 6, 1998

The only newspapers that can be bought are the ones not worth buying. -- Lord Liverpool (1770-1828

A newspaper [is] a device incapable of distinguishing between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.

ANONYMOUS, early 20th century, in George F. Will, "A Week of Sheer Fakery," Newsweek, 15 September 1997

 

 

"Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment." - Charles Lamb, 1833, )n Books and Reading.

 

"The printing press is the mother of errors." - Italian Proverb.

 

The First Duty of a newspaper is to be Accurate. If it is Accurate, it follows that it is Fair. -- Herbert Bayard Swope (1882-1958), in a letter to the New York Herald Tribune, Mar. 16, 1958

 

"Never forget it you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one." - Arthur Brisbane, c1900.

 

Newspapers should be limited to advertising.  - NAPOLEON (1769-1821), In the Words of Napoleon, p. 9, tr. Daniel Savage Gray, 1977 "(on newspaper articles)

 

 Their careless authors only strive to join/ As many words, as make an even line;/As many lines, as fill a row complete;/As many rows, as furnish up a sheet:/From side to side, with ready types they run,/ The measure's ended, and the work is done." - George Crabbe, 1785, The Newspaper.                                                        

To get the truth from a newspaper you have to read between the lies.

ANONYMOUS, in Simon James and Robert Parker, comps., A Dictionary of Business Quotations, p. 92, 1990

            "I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction." - Aneurin Bevan

"Every newspaper editor pays tribute to the devil." La Fontaine

 

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.  ~Thomas Jefferson
They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.  ~James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982

 

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle . . .. The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them: inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors." Thomas Jefferson (1807)

 

REPORTER

 

"A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom -- it's gone."
-Edward R. Murrow, News Summaries, December 31, 1955

 

 

"Myths are for churchgoers, not  "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become the Fourth Estate of the realm." Thomas Babington Macaulay

s." Sherman Duffy

"A reporter is no better than his source of information." Justice William O. Douglas

 

We can't quite decide if the world is growing worse, or if the reporters are just working harder.  ~The Houghton Line, November 1965

 

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.  ~William Tecumseh Sherman

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.  ~Gandhi

"Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity."
-Russell Baker, The Good Times, 1989

 

"A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom -- it's gone."
-Edward R. Murrow News Summaries, December 31, 1955

 

A reporter must always guard against reporting the plausible as the actual, and this is certainly true in foreign affairs. What is likely or logical does not always happen in foreign policy; reporting likelihoods as facts before they come true is not far removed, it seems to me, from other kinds of misreporting. -- Robert J. Manning, editor of The Atlantic, in ``The Responsibility of the Press,'' Fleet Publishing Corp., 1966

 

A good journalist is a rewarding sight. . . . He must have a zest for events. . . . He must have a dedication to facts and a scent of humbug. . . . He must cultivate skepticism while avoiding cynicism. . . . He must learn to cover . . . causes for which he can have sympathy but must not display loyalty. . . . He must be incorruptible. . . . He must go where he is not wanted, and be resistant to those who are too welcoming. And for all of this, his hours will be long, his pay inadequate, and his standing in the community not particularly high. -- Thomas Griffith of Time

It sometimes takes a while for executives to figure out that the reporters they think of as little bugs to be squashed or spun can be more powerful than they are.
---Jonathan Alter
Newsweek, August 14, 1995

Am I surprised that Joe Klein [pseudonymous author of Primary Colors which he denied writing] lied? No, because in my opinion reporters lie all the time.
--James Carville
The New Republic, August 12, 1996

"Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity."

"Everyone has a magic button. Our role as reporters is to find it and push it." –adage

 

"Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description." -Anna Quindlen, author/journalist, 1993

 

 

There is a bias in television journalism. It is not against any particular party or point of view — it is against understanding.

JOHN BIRT (English broadcasting executive), in Times (London), 28 February 1975

Success in the field [of journalism] comes from a fortuitous combination of luck and shoe leather.

DOUGLASS CATER, The Fourth Branch of Government, 1, 1959

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

G. K. CHESTERTON, "The Purple Wig," The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914

What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.

PAUL FUSSELL, "'A Power of Facing Unpleasant Facts'" (1981), Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, 1988

I call "journalism" everything that will be less interesting tomorrow than today.

ANDRÉ GIDE, journal, 1921 (detached page), tr. Justin O'Brien, 1948

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.

WALTER LIPPMANN, "Journalism and the Higher Law," Liberty and the News, 1920

Journalism is the last refuge of the vaguely talented.

WALTER LIPPMANN (1889-1974), quoted by Charles McDowell, commentator, "Washington Week," television news program, PBS, 4 March 1994

See Samuel Johnson in Patriotism

 [Modern journalism] justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

OSCAR WILDE, "The Critic as Artist" (1), Intentions, 1891

 

                             Editors

"The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe . . ." Thorstein Veblen

Reading something edited by an editor is like kissing a girl through a veil. -- Abe Hirschfield, former publisher of the New York Post

Most editors are failed writers — but so are most writers.

T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965), in Robert Giroux, The Education of an Editor, p. 22, 1982

The discovery of new talent is the greatest reward that can come from [publishing house] editorial work.

Editor is  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

It is, in the end, the best reason for being an editor.

ROBERT GIROUX, closing words, The Education of an Editor, 1982

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 Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days, p. 46, 1914

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807

Writing is adding; editing is subtracting.

MICHAEL LARSEN, personal communication, 11 August 1994

There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns....

I am paid $150 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with — others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things — and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job....

We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

JOHN SWINTON (New York Sun editor), remarks at a dinner given in his honor by colleagues, 12 April 1893, in Upton Sinclair, ed., The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, 15, 1915

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 worse, 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, "Slavery in Massachusetts," speech, Farmingham, 4 July 1854

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

E. B. WHITE, letter to Shirley Wiley, 30 March 1954, in Letters of E. B. White, ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth, 1976

NEWS

What's wan man's news is another man's troubles.

FINLEY PETER DUNNE, "The News of a Week," Observations by Mr. Dooley, 1902

In an Ocean of News, scarce a drop of Truth.

JAMES HOWELL, comp., "Divers Centuries of New Sayings" (p. 5), Paroimiographia: Proverbs, or Old Sayed Sawes & Adages in English... Italian, French and Spanish, 1659

Nowadays Truth is the greatest News.

THOMAS FULLER, comp., Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, 3689, 1732

Who brings good news may knock boldly.

JAMES HOWELL, comp., "French" (p. 8), Paroimiographia: Proverbs, or Old Sayed Sawes & Adages in English... Italian, French and Spanish, 1659

That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

GARRISON KEILLOR, his signature line, "A Prairie Home Companion," radio entertainment-program series, 1974-1987

If You Don't Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own.

SCOOP NISKER, book title, 1994

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

A. J. LIEBLING, "A Talkative Something-or-Other," New Yorker, 7 April 1956

I do not like to get the news because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

OGDEN NASH, "Everybody Tells Me Everything," The Face Is Familiar, 1940

When a dog bites a man, that is not news because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.

JOHN B. BOGART (New York Sun city editor), 1880s?, in F. M. O'Brien, The Story of the Sun, 10, 1918

Nobody likes the bringer of bad news.

SOPHOCLES (496?-406 B.C.), Antigone, l. 270, tr. Elizabeth Wyckoff, 1954

A democracy is badly served when newspapers and television focus so intensely on the personal joys and tragedies of famous people. This kind of "news" crowds out more serious issues, and there is an important difference — as the Constitution's framers well knew, and as many people today appear to have forgotten — between the public interest and what interests the public.

CASS R. SUNSTEIN, "Reinforce the Walls of Privacy," New York Times, 6 September 1997

News is a business, but it is also a public trust.

DAN RATHER, "From Murrow to Mediocrity?" New York Times, 10 March 1987

You don't tell us how to stage the news, we won't tell you how to cover it.

LARRY SPEAKES (presidential assistant to Ronald Reagan), sign on the press secretary's desk in his White House office, in Mark Hertsgaard, "How Reagan Seduced Us: Inside the President's Propaganda Factory," Village Voice (New York City), 25 September 1984

Bad news is more readily believed than good news.

SAYING

 

JOURNALISTS

The punditocracy is a tiny group of highly visible political pontificators who make their living offering "inside political opinions and forecasts" in the elite national media. And it is their debate, rather than any semblance of a democratic one, that determines the parameters of political discourse in the nation today.

ERIC ALTERMAN, introduction to Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics, 1992

A correspondent indiscreet enough to use honest, intemperate language will lose "access" to officials, which is much like a surgeon losing his knife.

RICHARD J. BARNET, on the Washington press corps, Roots of War, 10.8, 1971

Most stories come out of meetings or in story conferences. They go from ideas that aren't well formed — that haven't yet collided with facts — through editors to a reporter. It's up to the reporter to bring them to life. That's the earliest test of a good journalist — how those ideas get translated into stories. You've got to learn when to say, "That's enough, I'm going to write it now."

BEN BRADLEE, Ken Adelman interview, Washingtonian, September 1991

Walk fast, type fast, and never break a deadline.

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN, Marty Moss-Coane radio interview, NPR, 7 August 1995

 [As a reporter] I like to keep in the middle and be disliked by both sides.

JIMMY BRESLIN, in Associated Press, "Goetz Trial Testimony Ends with Feisty Breslin," San Francisco Chronicle, 18 April 1996

There were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.

EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797), in Thomas Carlyle, "The Hero as Man of Letters," On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841

The reporter [is] one who each twenty-four hours dictates a first draft of history.

DOUGLASS CATER, The Fourth Branch of Government, 1, 1959

A friendship between reporter and source lasts only until it is profitable for one to betray the other.

MAUREEN DOWD, stating the "Woodward-Darman law," "Thou Shalt Not Leave a Paper Trail," New York Times Magazine, 8 May 1994

I have always felt that whatever the Divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to report.

CHARLES A. DANA (1819-1897), in Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1 (introduction), 1961

Hey, I never knew that before; and hey, I never thought of that before.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, his personal criteria for judging a good column, Charlie Rose television interview, PBS, 30 July 1996

Get it first but get it right.

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST (publisher, 1863-1951), a repeated remark to his reporters, in Herb Caen, column, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 January 1995. To which his deadline-pressed reporters responded, "Don't get it right, get it written."

Any politician worth his salt is going to be able to dodge a question once. But when you're on live television, it becomes quickly apparent if you dodge it twice or three times. The problem is that the reporters don't follow up each other's questions.

MARK HERTSGAARD, "The Five O'Clock Follies" (interview), 15 March 1991, in David Barsamian, ed., Stenographers to Power, 1992

Television newsmen are breathless on how the game is being played, largely silent on what the game is all about.

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs, 3, 1981

With an air of slight indiscretion and personal trust, neither totally feigned, [Henry A.] Kissinger would share confidences and inside information [with journalists]. "You always have the feeling that he's told you ten percent more than he has to," said Barbara Walters.

WALTER ISAACSON, Kissinger: A Biography, 25, 1992

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw in character.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON (1908-1973), in "Lyndon Baines Johnson, an American Original," People, 2 February 1987

Reporters, especially those in Washington, face an old journalistic dilemma: because their stature tends to rise and fall with that of the people they cover, they thus have a stake in the successes of their subject.

WALTER ISAACSON, Kissinger: A Biography, 25, 1992

A news writer is a man without virtue who lies at home for his own profit. To these compositions is required neither genius nor knowledge, neither industry not sprightliness; but contempt of shame and indifference to truth are absolutely necessary.

SAMUEL JOHNSON, in The Idler (English journal), 30, 11 November 1758

Once every four days there was a voice on the other end of the phone: "Did you read what those pricks said today?" We'd all know who "they" were: The New York Times editorial writers. Not that the President of the United States used that kind of language.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, Anthony Lewis interview, "Civil Rights Activities, 1961-1962," Robert Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years, ed. Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, 1988

The task of editorial writers is to come down out of the hills after the battle is over to shoot the wounded.

MURRAY KEMPTON, as paraphrased by Lance Morrow, "A Battle with No Victors," Time, 27 May 1996

The journalist has comparably interested motives in his contacts with the official. He must woo and flatter the official because without his goodwill he will be deprived of information. But he cannot let himself be seduced — the secret dream of most officials — or he will lose his objectivity.

HENRY A. KISSINGER, White House Years, 2, 1979

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.

JANET MALCOLM, "The Journalist and the Murderer," New Yorker, March 1989

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.

KARL KRAUS (1874-1936), in Thomas S. Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors: A Pioneer Critic and His Criticism of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, 8, 1976

I have an old-fashioned belief that Americans like to make up their own minds on the basis of all available information. The conclusions you draw are your own affair. I have no desire to influence them, and shall leave such efforts to those who have more confidence in their own judgment than I have in mine.

EDWARD R. MURROW, radio broadcast to the U.S., London, 1? September 1939, in Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow, 6, 1969

As I leave the press, all I can say is this: for sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you've had a lot of fun — a lot of fun — that you've had an opportunity to attack me, and I think I've given as good as I've taken.

I leave you gentlemen now and you will now write it. You will interpret it. That's your right. But as I leave you, I want you to know — just think how much you're going to be missing.

You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.

RICHARD M. NIXON, remarks to reporters after being defeated in his California gubernatorial campaign, news conference, Beverly Hills, 7 November 1962

If you spend your life as a hatchet man — and there's something to be said for that — then eventually you find that everybody's out to lunch when you call. You're left with only your own opinion. I wouldn't like that because my own opinions aren't that good.

JAMES RESTON, in New Republic, 1980, quoted in R. W. Apple, Jr., "James Reston, a Journalist Nonpareil, Dies at 86," New York Times, 8 December 1995

Journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, "The Art of Literature: On Some Forms of Literature," Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, tr. T. Bailey Saunders, 1851

A true journalist is fact-proof.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, "Echolalia," The Sanity of Art, 1895

Writing a column is easy. I just sit down at the typewriter, open a vein and bleed it out.

WALTER "RED" SMITH (sportswriter), in Pete Axthelm, "The Master's Touch," Newsweek, 17 May 1976

Good! Now we'll have news from hell before breakfast.

WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, 1863, after being told that three members of the press had been killed by artillery-fire during the siege of Vicksburg, in Dixon Wecter, The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-Worship, 12.3, 1941

You're only as good as your last story.

HELEN THOMAS, complete acceptance speech on receiving the first Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award, White House Correspondents Dinner, Washington, 25 April 1998

If I ever needed a brain transplant, I'd choose a sportswriter because I'd want a brain that had never been used.

NORM VAN BROCKLIN (football player), in Robert Byrne, comp., 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, 3.344, 1988

I always learned more about what was on the minds of the people from the reporters' questions than they could possible learn from me.

HARRY S. TRUMAN, "My View of the Presidency," Look, 11 November 1958

Shakspeer rote good plase, but he wouldn't hav succeeded as a Washington correspondent of a New York daily paper. He lackt the rekesit fancy and imagginashun.

ARTEMUS WARD (1834-1867), "On 'Forts,'" The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, 1898

Nothing is ever finally off the record if it's said within the hearing of a reporter, no matter what the social circumstances.

TOM WICKER, On Press, 7, 1978

When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend.

THEODORE H. WHITE, in "The Hard-to-Cover Campaign," Newsweek, 23 October 1972

Be neither in nor out.

TOM WICKER, referring to the journalist's news sources, his "Third Law of Journalism," On Press, 7, 1978

Follow the money.

EDWARD BENNET WILLIAMS, early 1970s, quoted by Evan Thomas, commentator, "Inside Washington," television news program, 14 June 1997. This saying, now proverbial among investigative reporters, was popularized by the 1976 film All the President's Men, but it's not in the 1974 book about the Watergate scandal by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on which the film was based.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.

HUMBERT WOLFE, "Over the Fire," The Uncelestial City, 1930

Newspaper people, whose stock in trade is information and the reputation for having it.

TOM WICKER, On Press, 10, 1978

Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

SAYING (AMERICAN), the journalist's credo

 

TELEVISION

The minds that control [television] are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have room for a network vice president's heart.

FRED ALLEN (1894-1956), in Leslie Halliwell, ed., Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion, p. 601, 1984

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

FRED ALLEN (1894-1956), in Jonathon Green, Says Who? A Guide to the Quotations of the Century, p. 21, 1988

See Saying (English) in Imitation

Television is the first truly democratic culture — the first culture available to everyone and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

CLIVE BARNES, in "Arts in the 60's: Coming to Terms with Society and Its Woes" (a round-table discussion), New York Times, 30 December 1969

Nothing is really real unless it "happens" on television....

Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic — or, rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television.

DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, "The Great Electronic Dictator," New York Times Book Review, 19 February 1978

Television is an amusement park.... We're in the boredom-killing business.

PADDY CHAYEFSKY, Network (film), 1976, spoken by Peter Finch (in the role of Howard Beal)

Television is the source from which most people now receive their news. It is also usually rated the most believable of their sources for following public events. The younger and less educated people are, the more they watch television and depend on it for interpreting political developments.

THOMAS E. CRONIN, The State of the Presidency, 2nd ed., 3, 1980

I might have had trouble saving France in 1946 — I didn't have television then.

CHARLES de GAULLE, in "Small Screen, Super Weapon" (epigraph), Newsweek, 19 August 1963

The worst thing to be known as is intelligent. If that happens, we're doomed. Please do not call me intelligent. Call me outrageous. I'd rather be called sleazy than identified as intelligent.

PHIL DONAHUE, on what it takes to succeed on daytime television, in "No Comment," Progressive, February 1989

There is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.

NORA EPHRON, Scribble Scribble: Notes on the Media, 5, 1978

Life is not made up of dramatic incidents — not even the life of a nation. It is made up of slowly evolving events and processes, which newspapers, by a score of different forms of emphasis, can reasonably attempt to explore from day to day.

But television news jerks from incident to incident. For the real world of patient and familiar arrangements, it substitutes an unreal world of constant activity, and the effect is already apparent in the way in which the world behaves. It is almost impossible, these days, to consider any problem or any event except as a crisis; and, by this very way of looking at it, it in fact becomes a crisis.

HENRY FAIRLIE, "Can You Believe Your Eyes?" Horizon, Spring 1967

Television makes so much [money] at its worst that it can't afford to do its best.

FRED W. FRIENDLY, editors interview, "The 'Television Fiasco,'" U.S. News & World Report, 12 June 1967

A new dictum of post-modern politics: Power no longer comes from the barrel of the gun or even the tireless effort of party apparatchiks in the precincts or at the convention. Power comes from the angle of the camera.

NATHAN GARDELS, referring to television, "Doing As the Romans Do," Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 18 April 1994

The commercial is the purpose, the essence; the program is the package.

TODD GITLIN, "Sixteen Notes on Television and the Movement," in George Abbott White and Charles Hamilton Newman, eds., Literature in Revolution, 1972

Why should people go out and pay to see bad movies when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?

SAM GOLDWYN, in Observer (British newspaper), 9 September 1956

Journalism as theater [is what] TV news is.

THOMAS GRIFFITH, "Excluded from the Big Moment," Time, 9 February 1981

More and more, what doesn't show up on the screen doesn't exist, and what shows up badly is doomed.

STANLEY HOFFMAN, "Semidetached Politics" (3), New York Review of Books, 8 November 1984

All television is educational television. The only question is, what is it teaching?

NICHOLAS JOHNSON (Federal Communications Commission chairman), in Joan Barthel, "Notes in a Viewer's Album," Life, 10 September 1971

The conversation of politics now is carried on in the vernacular of advertising. The big sell, the television sell, appears to be the only way to sell. Increasingly, and especially in Washington, how well one does on television has come to determine how well one does in life.

MICHAEL KELLY, "David Gergen, Master of the Game: How Image Became the Sacred Faith of Washington, and How This Insider's Insider Became Its High Priest," New York Times Magazine, 31 October 1993

It is not that what is purveyed to [children] is always directly hurtful, intentionally or otherwise. Some of it even tries to be helpful. The evil lies rather in the forfeiture of what the child might otherwise be doing if he or she were not watching television.

GEORGE F. KENNAN, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, 8, 1993

 [The viewer] watches me and he chooses to believe that I believe what he believes.

TED KOPPEL, on his "fill-in-the-blank quality" (Marchand) as a broadcast journalist, in Philip Marchand, "Designing a Video Mask of Many Faces," New York Times, 13 August 1989

Isn't it odd that networks accept billions of dollars from advertisers to teach people to use products and then proclaim that children aren't learning about violence from their steady diet of it on television!

TONI LIEBMAN, "A Call to Action," NYSAEYC Reporter, Fall 1993

Television seems to be addictive. Because of the way the visual signal is processed in the mind, it inhibits cognitive processes. Television qualifies more as an instrument of brainwashing, sleep induction and/or hypnosis than anything that stimulates conscious learning processes.

Television is a form of sense deprivation, causing disorientation and confusion. It leaves viewers less able to tell the real from the not-real, the internal from the external, the personally experienced from the externally implanted. It disorients a sense of time, place, history and nature.

Television is an instrument of transmutation, turning people into their TV images.

JERRY MANDER, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 11, 1977

 

I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room and read a good book.

GROUCHO MARX (1890-1977), in Leslie Halliwell, ed., Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion, p. 601, 1984

The success of any TV performer depends on his achieving a low-pressure style of presentation.

MARSHALL McLUHAN, in Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President 1968, 2, 1969

I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air... and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

NEWTON MINOW (Federal Communications Commission chairman), speech before the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, 9 May 1961

This instrument can teach. It can illuminate. Yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box.

EDWARD R. MURROW, speech before the Radio and Television News Directors Association, Chicago, 15 October 1958

If television and radio are to be used for the entertainment of all of the people all of the time, we have come perilously close to discovering the real opiate of the people.

EDWARD R. MURROW, speech (after receiving the Albert Einstein Award), Brandeis University, Waltham (Massachusetts), 1958, in Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow, 10, 1969

See Karl Marx in Religion, Anti

If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.

EDWARD R. MURROW, letter to a minister, 1958, in Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow, 10, 1969

See Lewis Mumford in Communications

Children are inclined to learn from television [because]... it is never too busy to talk to them, and it never has to brush them aside while it does household chores. Unlike their preoccupied parents, television seems to want their attention at any time, and goes to considerable lengths to attract it.

NATIONAL COMMISSION ON THE CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE, in "Excerpts from National Panel's Statement on Violence in TV Entertainment," New York Times, 25 September 1969

Image is, I think, all-important in television. That's why, frankly, you should be more concerned about your makeup artist than your researcher, the one that blows your hair dry than what's between your ears. That's television.

RICHARD M. NIXON, Morton Kondrake television interview, PBS, 4 May 1990

A show can "appeal" to a child... without necessarily offering the child amusement or pleasure. It appeals if it helps him express his inner tensions and fantasies in a manageable way. It appeals if it gets him a little scared or mad or befuddled and then offers him a way to get rid of his fear, anger, or befuddlement.

VANCE PACKARD, summarizing a finding from a television motivational research study titled "Now, for the Kiddies...," The Hidden Persuaders, 15, 1957

The price of admission is candid conversation.

MIKE WALLACE, on being a "60 Minutes" guest (the popular television magazine program was celebrating its 25th anniversary at the time), John Chancellor interview, CNN, 11 November 1993

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

ORSON WELLES, in New York Herald Tribune, 12 October 1956

The Plug-In Drug.

MARIE WINN, on television, book title, 1977

 

What programs like "60 Minutes" — and their equivalents in the printed press — are after is not social or political justice but grist for the mill, and the easiest, most lurid way to provide it is to chase after individuals rather than institutions.

JONATHAN YARDLEY, on "the conversion of journalism into entertainment," "The Truly Corrupt Vs. the Merely Sleazy," Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 7 October 1991

Some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes.

ANONYMOUS (AMERICAN), James Mason Brown quoting his very young son's friend, in an interview (28 July 1955) with James B. Simpson, comp., Best Quotes of '54, '55, '56, p. 233, 1957

Daddy, Daddy, there's the man who lives in our TV.

ANONYMOUS (AMERICAN), child who spotted a much-televised political leader at a campaign rally, in Boston Globe, 21 November 1986

Television changes events merely by covering them.

ANONYMOUS

The worst television programs are the ones not quite bad enough to switch off.

ANONYMOUS

If it bleeds, it leads.

SAYING (AMERICAN), on television news

"Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning." Marshal McLuhan

"Television, whether you like it or not, is the most powerful educational force known to man and we're quivering it away and I find that unacceptable. When are we going to scream, "That's enough!" Fred Friendly, Former President of CBS News

 

"Entertainment is the most powerful educational force of any culture." George Gerbner, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

"Everything on television is educating in the broadest sense of the word." Dorothy Singer, Ed.D., Yale University

"Television is basically teaching whether you want it to or not." Jim Henson, Muppets Creator

"We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores. When our kids come home from school do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos. Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learn between 9:00 am and 3:00 p.m." President George Bush

"We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but the worst crime is abandoning the children." Gabriela Mistral, Chilean poet

"Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?" Plato

"If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it."Jerome Singer, Yale Psychology Professor

 

"Television and all who participate in it are jointly accountable to the American public for respect for the special needs of children, for community responsibility, for the advancement of education and culture, for the acceptability of the program materials chosen, for decency and decorum in production, and for propriety in advertising." National Association of Broadcasters, 1952

"Television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us." Edward R. Murrow

"The First Amendment forbids the government from interfering with free speech; it does not prohibit citizens from voicing their displeasure at speech that, whether for good or bad, they do not like." Newton N. Minow, former FCC Chairman

"To harness the power of television for the education of our nation's children, everyone must get involved - television programmers, government leaders, teachers, and above all, parents." Edwin Newman

"We're strip-mining our children's minds and we're doing it for commercial profit without any concern for the longer-term consequences for them and for our society." Vice-President Albert Gore

"But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you - and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland." Newton Minow, previous Chairman of the FCC, 1961

"The problem is that, as a nation, we have not dedicated ourselves to using broadcasting to support schoolroom learning and to create a learning society that will help us achieve the national goals that we all applaud." Lloyd Morrisett, President, Markle Foundation

 

"We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings." Bill Moyers

"Let the broadcasters know that you are watching them, that you know about this law, and that you expect them to comply with more than just the minimum." Katherine Montgomery, President, Campaign for Kids' TV

"What always puzzles me is why parents aren't more alarmed about this situation, and why they don't make their wishes felt, but they don't." Joan Cooney, Founder, Children's Television Workshop

"Commissioner Chong stated that one area she would focus on would be that of children's television programming. She spoke of the need to produce programming for children that is both entertaining and educational." FCCBulletin

 

 

Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off.  ~Author Unknown


All television is educational television.  The question is:  what is it teaching?  ~Nicholas Johnson


Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.  ~Ann Landers


I find television to be very educating.  Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.  ~Groucho Marx


We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores.  When our kids come home from school do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos?  Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learns between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.  ~George Bush


If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it.  ~Jerome Singer


Television:  A medium - so called because it is neither rare nor well done.  ~Ernie Kovacs


Television has changed a child from an irresistible force to an immovable object.  ~Author Unknown


Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.  ~David Frost


We can put it in its proper perspective by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.  ~Robert M. Hutchins, News Summaries, 31 December 1977


TV.  If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six.  Open your child's imagination.  Open a book.  ~Author Unknown


The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.  ~Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun


Television!  Teacher, mother, secret lover.  ~Homer Simpson, The Simpsons


I wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence.  There's a knob called "brightness," but that doesn't work.  ~Author Unknown


It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.  ~R. Serling


Television:  chewing gum for the eyes.  ~Frank Lloyd Wright


If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all.  ~Joey Adams


Ninety-eight percent of American homes have TV sets, which means the people in the other 2% have to generate their own sex and violence.  ~Franklin P. Jones


The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.  ~Andrew Ross


Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?  ~Al Boliska


All television is children's television.  ~Richard P. Adler


Art is moral passion married to entertainment.  Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.  ~Rita Mae Brown


I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality.  ~P.J. O'Rourke


If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.  ~Dave Barry


When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio.  And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better." ~Alistair Cooke

 

 

Freedom of the press

 

             
             

              "A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad."                                                                                                                                                          

              Albert CAMUS
Resistance, Rebellion and Death
French-Algerian author (1913-1960)                                                                                                              

              "Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty."                                                                                                                                          

              Albert CAMUS
French-Algerian author (1913-1960)                                                                                                              

              "La liberté de la presse ne s'use que quand on ne s'en sert pas." (The freedom of the press is never used up / worn out except when you don't use it).                                                                                                         

              Le CANARD ENCHAINÉ
The motto of this current French satirical magazine                                                                                        

              "Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant'."                                                                                                                                                       

              Robert Anson HEINLEIN
A Rabble in Arms
American science fiction writer (1907-88)                                                                                                       

              "To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."                                                                                                                                      

              Claude Adrien HELVÉTIUS
French philosopher (1715–71)                                                                                                                        

              "Let it be impressed upon your minds, let it be instilled into your children, that the liberty of the press is the palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights."                                                                                

              JUNIUS
English political author, known only by the signature Junius
Wrote various letters to the London Public Advertiser from Jan., 1769, to Jan., 1772                                    

              "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."                                                                 

              A.J. LIEBLING                                                                                                                                  

              "A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society."                                                                                                                      

              Walter LIPPMANN
American journalist (1889-1974)
             

              "Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose."     

              Eric Arthur Blair or George ORWELL
British novelist and essayist (1903-1950)
             

              "It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper."                                                                                                                                                     

              Jerry SEINFELD
American comedian and actor (1955-)                                                                                                            

              "Freedom of the press, or, to be more precise, the benefit of freedom of the press, belongs to everyone - to the citizen as well as the publisher... The crux is not the publisher's 'freedom to print'; it is, rather, the citizen's 'right to know.' "                                                                                                                                                       

              Arthur Sulzburger
1990
American newspaper publisher
             

              "In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates.."                                                                                                                 

              Alexis de TOCQUEVILLE
French politician and writer (1805-1859)                                                                                                        

 

 

            Albert Camus

With freedom of the press, nations are not sure of going toward justice and peace. But without it, they are sure of not going there.

ALBERT CAMUS, "Homage to an Exile," 1955, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, tr. Justin O'Brien, 1961

Alexander Cockburn

Press criticism in the absence of a political party is ultimately only one hand clapping.

ALEXANDER COCKBURN, "The Gulf War and the Media" (interview), 4 June 1991, in David Barsamian, ed., Stenographers to Power, 1992

 

Sigmund Freud

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me; nowadays they are content with burning my books.

SIGMUND FREUD, 1933 (soon after the Nazis came to power in Germany), in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 29, 1953-1957, abr. 1961

Heinrich Heine

Wherever books are burned, sooner or later men also are burned.

HEINRICH HEINE, Almansor, l. 245, 1823

Helvétius

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

HELVÉTIUS, De l'homme, 1772

Thomas Jefferson

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

THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to James Currie, 18 January 1786

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Col. Edward Carrington, 16 January 1787

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be.... Where the press if free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Col. Charles Yancey, 6 January 1816

Samuel Johnson

If nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth.

SAMUEL JOHNSON, "Milton," Lives of the English Poets, 1781

A. J. Liebling

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

A. J. LIEBLING, "The Wayward Press," New Yorker, 14 May 1960

Walter Lippman

A press monopoly is incompatible with a free press; and one can proceed with this principle: if there is a monopoly of the means of communications — of radio, television, magazines, books, public meetings — it follows that this society is by definition and in fact deprived of freedom.

WALTER LIPPMAN, address before the International Press Institute, London, 27 May 1965

Benito Mussolini

The press of Italy is free, freer than the press of any other country, so long as it supports the regime.

BENITO MUSSOLINI, in George Seldes, Sawdust Caesar, 27, 1935

Napoleon

I shall never tolerate the newspapers to say or do anything against my interests; they may publish a few little articles with just a little poison in them, but one fine morning somebody will shut their mouths.

NAPOLEON, letter to his minister of police Joseph Fouché, 22 April 1805, The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words, 160, ed. J. Christopher Herold, 1955

If I were to give liberty to the press, my power could not last three days.

NAPOLEON (1769-1821), in Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Napoleon; or, The Man of the World," Representative Men, 1850

Arthur Schopenhauer

Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, "On Law and Politics" (7), 1851, Essays and Aphorisms, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, 1970

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, in "Solzhenitsyn: An Artist Becomes an Exile," Time, 25 February 1974

Oswald Spengler

As for the modern press, the sentimentalist may beam with contentment when it is constitutionally "free" — but the realist merely asks at whose disposal it is.

OSWALD SPENGLER, "Philosophy of Politics," The Decline of the West, 1918-1922, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, 1962

Adlai E. Stevenson

The rock-bottom foundation of a free press is the integrity of the people who run it.

ADLAI E. STEVENSON, speech to journalists, Portland (Oregon), 8 September 1952

Henry David Thoreau

The last new journal thinks that it is very liberal, nay, bold.... If it had been published at the time of the famous dispute between Christ and the doctors, it would have published only the opinions of the doctors and suppressed Christ's. There is no need of a law to check the license of the press. It is law enough, and more than enough, to itself. Virtually, the community have come together and agreed what things shall be uttered, have agreed on a platform and to excommunicate him who departs from it, and not one in a thousand dares utter anything else.... [The journals] have been bribed to keep dark. They are in the service of hypocrisy.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, journal, 2 March 1858

Alexis de Tocqueville

Servitude cannot be complete if the press is free; the press is the chief democratic instrument of freedom.

ALEXIS de TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America, 2.4.7, 1840, tr. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen, 1862

It is a free press...There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.
- Mark Twain

...the liberty of the Press is called the Palladium of Freedom, which means, in these days, the liberty of being deceived, swindled, and humbugged by the Press and paying hugely for the deception.
-Mark Twain

 

 

Computers

 

 

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
Joseph Campbell

 

The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity - the rest is overhead for the operating system.

 

Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers.

 

 

The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.
Rick Cook, "The Wizardry Compiled"

 

First learn computer science and all the theory.
Next develop a programming style.
Then forget all that and just hack.
George Carrette [1990]

 

Linux _is_ user-friendly.
It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
-- Anonymous

 

 

I think there's a world market for about 5 computers.
Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM (around 1948)

 

The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.
Edsger Dijkstra

 

There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tessler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
Douglas R. Hofstadter

 

Heuristics are bug ridden by definition. If they didn't have bugs, then they'd be algorithms.

 

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.

 

Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds.
J. Finnegan, USC.

 

Never trust an operating system.
If you find a solution and become attached to it,
the solution may become your next problem.
-- Anonymous

 

 

In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals. You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them.
Robert Lucky

 

Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room.

 

Real programmers detest candy-ass architects. Candy-ass architects won't allow Execute instructions to address another Execute. Real programmers despise petty restrictions.

 

Real programmers don't believe in schedules. Planners make up schedules. Managers firm up schedules. Frightened coders strive to meet schedules. Real programmers ignore schedules.

 

 

Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

 

Real programmers don't document. Documentation is for simps who can't read the listings of the object deck.

 

Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Cavemen drew flowcharts, and look how much good it did them.

 

Real programmers don't write in APL, unless the whole program can be written in one line.

 

Real programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually no programmers write in BASIC after the age of twelve.

 

Real programmers don't write in LISP. Only dweeb programs contain more parentheses than actual code.

 

Real programmers have no use for managers. Managers are a necessary evil. They exist only to deal with personnel bozos, bean counters, senior planners, and other mental defectives.

 

Real programmers like vending machine popcorn. Coders pop it in the microwave oven. Real programmers use the heat from the CPU. They can tell which jobs are running from the rate of popping.

 

Real programmers never work 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9 am, it's because they were up all night.

 

Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue.

Linux is user friendly, it's just selective who its friends are...

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one

works.

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and

bragged about forever.

Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to

write, it should be hard to understand.

All computers wait at the same speed.

Why can't life be menu-driven or at least have an 'undo' feature?

-David M. De Felice

 

To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer.

               -- Anonymous

              

 

Want to make your computer go really fast? Throw it out the window!

               -- Anonymous

              

 

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

               -- Asimov, Isaac (*)

              

 

There's no problem so large it can't be solved by killing the user off,

deleting their files, closing their account and reporting their REAL

earnings to the IRS.

               -- Bastard Operator from Hell [Anke Bodzin]

 

But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more

than these cometh of evil.

               -- Bible (Matthew)

 

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee--that

will do them in.

               -- Bradley's Bromide

 

Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good;

and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.

               -- Brandon, Dick

 

Beware of programmers who carry screw drivers.

               -- Brandwein, Leonard

 

Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read.

               -- Button

 

Usenet isn't a right. It's a right, a left, and a swift uppercut to

the jaw.

        -- Button

 

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to

build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying

to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

               -- Cook. Rich (*)

               K: programming computers intelligence software

 

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the

computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, geta million miles

per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.

               -- Cringely, Robert X.

               C: from _InfoWorld_

               K: computers evolution cars automobiles

 

 

The first step is to decide what Internet services users need to

access and limit their access to those services.

n  Jesson, Joseph

 

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

               -- Kulawiec, Rich (*)

 

 

Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal--if you don't use

your thumbs.

               -- Lehrer, Tom

 

If you sat a monkey down in front of a keyboard, the first thing typed

would be a UNIX command.

               -- Lye, Bill (*)

 

 

I have a spelling checker,

It came with my PC;

It plainly marks four my revue

Mistakes I cannot sea.

I've run this poem threw it,

I'm sure your pleased too no,

Its letter perfect in it's weigh,

My checker tolled me sew.

               -- Minor, Janet

 

 

 

We may begin to see reality differently simply because the

computer ... provides a different angle on reality.

               -- Pagels, Heinz

 

 

Hardware : The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.

               -- Pesis, Jeff (*)

 

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

               -- Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973) (*)

 

Be warned that being an expert is more than understanding how a system

is supposed to work. Expertise is gained by investigating why a system

doesn't work.

               -- Redman, Brian (*)

 

In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.

               -- Reid, Brian K. (*)

 

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things

they make it easier to do don't need to be done.

               -- Rooney, Andy (*)

 

Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for

the rest of your life.

n  Sinz, Michael [Commodore-Amiga Inc.

 

Real Programmers never work from 9 to 5. If any real programmer is

around at 9 a.m., it's because they were up all night.

        -- Some Computer Geek

 

 

If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a

lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would

conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.

               -- Stampfli, Rob

 

I have no sustained relationship with any person whom I've met

only by and through E-mail.... I uncharitably speculate that it's

because I already have a life.

               -- Sterling, Bruce

 

Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.

               -- Unknown

 

 

Go not to Usenet for counsel, for it will say both no, and yes, and

no, and yes....

               -- Unknown

 

 

I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code!

               -- Unknown

 

If a train station is where a train stops, what's a workstation?

               -- Unknown

 

I just found out that the brain is like a computer. If that's true,

then there really aren't any stupid people. Just people running DOS.

               -- Unknown

 

 

PROGRAM - n. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's

input into error messages.  v. tr.- To engage in a pastime similar to

banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.

               -- Unknown

 

REAL PROGRAMMERS don't comment their code. If it was hard to

write, it should be hard to understand.

               -- Unknown

 

"I stood up in the audience during the question session and said, 'What do you propose to do with the 3 million existing Cobol programmers?' And the answer was, 'Shoot them.'"

- Edward Yourdon

 

"Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations. They now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'"

- Peter Drucker

 

"The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim."

- Edsger Dijkstra

 

"The brain happens to be a neat machine."

- Marvin Minsky

 

"Some people fear that technology will become more engaging than live human interactions. That's silly; technology is already way more interesting than other people."

- Scott Adams

 

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."

- Robert Wilensky

 

 

"The fantastic advances in the field of communication constitute a grave danger to the privacy of the individual."

- Earl Warren

 

"Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts."

- Robert L. Glass

 

"640k ought to be enough for anybody."

- Bill Gates, 1981

 

"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."

- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

 

 

"The goal of Software Engineering is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it."

- Unknown

 

"Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job.."

- Mosher's Law of Software Engineering

 

Unix is simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity.

Unix is a very user-friendly system. It's just that it is particular about which users it chooses to be friendly with.

Computers do not solve problems, they execute solution.

It is easier to write an incorrect program than to understand a correct one.

Using MSDOS on a 386 is like using a Formula-1 race car to do your grocery shopping.

A system without PERL is like a hockey game without a fight.

Did you ever feel that you were a typewriter, when everyone else in this world has a word processor?

ANONYMOUS QUOTES / QUOTES FROM UNKNOWN SOURCES

• If you don't know how to do something, you don't know how to do it with a computer.

ADAMS, DOUGLAS NOEL (1952-2001, Science Fiction/humor author)

• A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.
• First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII – and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

BARRY, DAVE

• USER, n.: The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."

BORENSTEIN, NATHANIEL

• The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

BRAUN, WERNER von (1912-1977, Engineer)

• The best computer is a man, and it's the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

COOK, RICH

• Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

ECKERT, J. PRESPER (Co-inventor of ENIAC, one of the first computers)

• I thought [computers] would be a universally applicable idea, like a book is. But I didn't think it would develop as fast as it did, because I didn't envision we'd be able to get as many parts on a chip as we finally got. The transistor came along unexpectedly. It all happened much faster than we expected.
  {1991}

PLATT, DAVE

• Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.

PRATCHETT, TERRY (1948-Present, Fantasy/satire author)

• The only time I think I'm rich is when I walk out of Virgin or somewhere with two bags of software. Being rich is never having to say "Can I afford the CD-rom version?"
  {Games Domain interview, Dec. 1, 1996}

SPAFFORD, EUGENE

• Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea; massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

STROUSTRUP, BJARNE (Creator of the C++ programming language)

• There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I know longer know how to use my telephone.

WHITE, ELWYN BROOKS

• Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man.

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics, 1949

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processings is a fad that won't last out the year."
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice-Hall, 1957

"But what...is it good for?"
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC

"Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple."
- Byte, December 1994

"I'm not dumb. I just have a command of throughly useless information."
- Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes

'Unix was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things.' --Doug Gwyn

'True research is like fumbling in the dark for the right switches. Once you've turned the light on everyone can see...' -- unknown

'An idiot with a computer is a faster, better idiot' -- Rich Julius


'Pascal - A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it.'

PROGRAM - n. - A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages. v. tr.- To engage in a pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.

'Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.' -- Donald Knuth

'Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.' -- Rich Cook

'C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.' -- Bjarne Stroustrup

'I've never met a human being who would want to read 17,000 pages of documentation, and if there was, I'd kill him to get him out of the gene pool.' -- Joseph Costello, President of Cadence


'The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.' -- E. W. Dijkstra

'It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that  have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.' -- Dijkstra

'A system admin's life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare. On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards!' -- Michael O'Brien

 

" I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." - The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what ... is it good for?" - Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968 commenting on the microchip.

" There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

The typical Internet user receives an average of 17,000 email messages per year. Of this total, an average of one message actually contains useful information (it says: 'Disregard previous email'). The rest are porno ads, investment opportunities for morons ('Make Big Money Petting Kittens At Home!'), and jokes that were originally set in movable type by Johann Gutenberg. --Dave Barry

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents. --Nathaniel Borenstein

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language. --D. E. Knuth, 1967

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. --Kulawiec

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. --Leslie Lamport, DEC Systems Research Center, 1987

A computer lets you make mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila. --D.W. McArthur

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of FORTRAN. --Alan Perlis

Home computers are the perfect thing for women who don't feel that men provide them with enough frustration. --J. Wagner

The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol. --Larry Wall

One computer is a problem. A computer network is a large problem. The internet is the world's largest problem. --Douglas Warren

An elephant is a mouse with an operating system. --Unknown

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it. --Unknown

The computer is mightier than the pen, the sword, and usually, the programmer. --Unknown

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
-- C. A. R. Hoare
 

The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway.
-- Bernard Avishai

 

 

Laurie Anderson

Sometimes when I work with these [computerized] voices, I have the illusion that I'm in touch with another intelligence, a wacky new life form. This happens only on good days, when all the systems are working. On bad days — when everything crashes and all the voices disappear — I start yelling at my computer, and then I think: "Wait a second. I might as well be talking to my electric pencil sharpener."

LAURIE ANDERSON (performance artist), "Dazed and Bemused," New York Times Magazine, 28 September 1997

Red Burns

To me, the computer is just another tool. It's like a pen. You have to have a pen, and to know penmanship, but neither will write the book for you.

RED BURNS (Interactive Telecommunications Program chairwoman, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts), in Sabra Chartrand, "Computer Theory as Social Science," New York Times, 4 December 1995

Nicholas Donatiello, Jr.

Television was the baby of radio. It was radio with pictures — it was better radio. In the say way, the car was the baby of the horse. Movies were the baby of theater. The telephone was the baby of the telegraph. So what's the P.C. [personal computer] the baby of? The P.C., I'm sorry to say, the P.C. is the baby of the mainframe computer.

NICHOLAS DONATIELLO, JR., keynote address at the Agenda 97 Conference, Phoenix, 1997, in Ken Auletta, "The Microsoft Provocateur," New Yorker, 12 May 1997

R. Buckminster Fuller

How DO we know that the people we meet are not computers programmed to simulate people?

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER, I Seem To Be a Verb, p. 167, 1970

International Business Machines

Do not fold, bend, or mutilate.

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES, INC., computer card message, 1960s

John F. Kennedy

I think one of the things which warmed us most during this flight was the realization that however extraordinary computers may be, we are still ahead of them, and that man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

JOHN F. KENNEDY, speech welcoming the return of astronaut Gordon Cooper who had taken over the controls of his spaceship in order to make a safe landing, Washington, 21 May 1963

Bob LeVitus

There are only two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data in a crash, and those who will lose data in a crash.

BOB LeVITUS, Dr. Macintosh: Tips, Techniques, and Advice on Mastering the Macintosh, 2, 1989

Peter H. Lewis

The Tarzan Principle: Don't let go of the first vine until the next one is firmly in your grasp.

PETER H. LEWIS, on replacing one's computer system, "When Reliability Is Most Important," New York Times, 16 July 1989

See Arthur Schopenhauer in Prudence: Rules

Edward Mendelson

Like any tyrant, a word-processing program both threatens and comforts. Obey its arbitrary inflexible rules, and it rewards you with tireless service in rearranging, removing, even correcting your words. Disobey its rules, and it responds either by issuing a warning beep and a terse instruction or by dissolving months of labor into scattered electrons. In millions of offices, the computer fulfills the tyrant's dream: it forbids everything that it does not permit.

EDWARD MENDELSON (professor of English and comparative literature), "The Corrupt Computer," New Republic, 22 February 1988

Elting E. Morison

The computer is no better than its program.

ELTING E. MORISON, Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 4, 1966

Lewis Mumford

In creating the thinking machine, man has made the last step in submission to mechanization; and his final abdication before this product of his own ingenuity has given him a new object of worship: a cybernetic god.

LEWIS MUMFORD, The Transformations of Man, 7.3, 1956

Ken Olson

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.

KEN OLSON (Digital Equipment Corp. president), speech before the Convention of the World Future Society, Boston, 1977, in Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, comps., The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, p. 209, 1984

Pablo Picasso

 

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973), in Robert Byrne, comp., 1,911 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, 2.623, 1988

Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton, Jr.

The electronic computer is to individual privacy what the machine gun was to the horse cavalry.

ALAN W. SCHEFLIN and EDWARD M. OPTON, JR., The Mind Manipulators: A Non-Fiction Account, 12, 1978

Anonymous

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

ANONYMOUS, in "Capsules of Wisdom," Farmers' Almanac for 1978, 1977

See Alexander Pope (1) in Errors

The computer is down. I hope it's down with something serious.

ANONYMOUS, in Stanton Delaplane, "Dealing with Sick Computers," San Francisco Chronicle, 11 July 1984

Saying

Garbage in, garbage out. (GIGO)

SAYING (AMERICAN)

Writing

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961), U.S. author. New York Journal-American (11 July 1961).

 

Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, Sir.
EMILY DICKENSON (1830-86), U.S. poet. Letter, July 1862, to clergyman and writer T. W. Higginson (published in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2, 1958).

 

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
ISAAC ASIMOV

 

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
RICHARD BACH

 

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.
INIGO DE LEON

 

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

 

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.
JOHN FARRAR

 

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.
WILLIAM FAULKNER

 

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
GENE FOWLER

 

They can't yank a novelist like thay can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

 

Half my life is an act of revision.
JOHN IRVING

 

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

I am a part of all I have read.
JOHN KIERAN

 

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
ELMORE LEONARD

 

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

 

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
EZRA POUND

 

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
MARCEL PROUST

 

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
BURTON RASCOE

 

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
ANDREW ROSS

 

A book worth reading is worth buying.
JOHN RUSKIN

 

No furniture is so charming as books.
SYDNEY SMITH

 

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
STEVEN SPIELBERG

 

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
GLORIA STEINEM

 

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

 

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
MARK TWAIN

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
A.J. LIEBLING (1904-1963)

 

I'm not really a good teacher because I don't really want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.
JOHN UPDIKE (b. 1932), American novelist. "On Reading, Writing and Rabbit", The New York Times, Interview with Clyde Haberman, Wednesday, March 6, 1996.

 

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.
RAYMOND CHANDLER (1888-1959), U.S. author. Letter, 6 Dec. 1948, to San Francisco Chronicle critic Lenore Glen Offord (published in Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962).

 

One's own thoughts, these are the most important things. Not the thoughts of others, because you'll never understand them. You'll never understand another writer. You'll never understand your wife or your children or your best friends. You may try to but you can only understand them through yourself. You see a lot of people around who are trying to understand other people, to find out what makes them tick. But they are looking away from the true object in their creativity. They should ask, "What makes ME tick?"
RAY BRADBURY in an interview with Frank Filosa, collected in On Being a Writer, ed. by Bill Strickland (Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books, 1989), p. 57.

 

Throw up in your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
RAY BRADBURY

 

I pray to God through my fingertips, through this machine.
MICHAEL BISHOP, "The Bob Dylan Tambourine Software & Satori Support Services Consortium, Ltd.," Close Encounters With The Deity, pp. 198-199.

 

Never walk over a writer ... unless you're positive he can't rise up behind you. If you're going to burn him, make sure he's dead. Because if he's alive, he will talk: talk in written form, on the printed, permanent page.
PHILIP K. DICK, Radio Free Albemuth, p. 77

 

Some people hijack planes and take hostages. I write books. If I didn't write I'd be dangerous.
FLORENCE KING

 

Aggression, the writer's main source of energy.
TED SOLOTAROFF (b. 1928), U.S. editor. "Writing in the Cold," in Granta, no. 15 (Cambridge, England, 1985).

 

Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don't need you.
JAMES MICHENER

 

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so.
ANDRE GIDE

 

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
JOHN OSBORNE

 

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

 

INTERVIEWER: How about financial security? Can that be detrimental to good writing?
HEMINGWAY: If it came early enough and you loved life as much as you loved your work it would take much character to resist the temptations. Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying. Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.
From Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series, ed. by George Plimpton (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 223.

 

If you are a civil servant at the Federal Trade Commission or the White House -- as I was before I became a free-lance writer -- you can sit at your desk and shoot the breeze with your boss and get paid. You can take sick days and get paid. The momentum of the organization takes up the slack of individuals. Income is to a large extent severed from output.

Free-lance writers get paid absolutely zero if they do not produce. (They often get paid zero even if they do produce.) They stand no chance of paying the mortgage and feeding the kids if they have not ground out the pages to sell.

If the ordinary American worker could know the free-lancer's fear when he faces his bills, if he could feel the sharply edged connection between output and being able to sleep at night, that worker would be a match for any Japanese or Korean.
BENJAMIN J. STEIN, writing in The Wall Street Journal, April 3, 1989

 

Fifty percent of writing is asking for the money. If you can't ask for the money, you have no business being in business.
Novelist-screenwriter ELMORE LEONARD

 

"Facts and fictions are different truths."
- in The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt by Patricia MacLachlan.

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." - Pablo Picasso

"Fiction is fact's elder sister." - Kipling

"Fancy with fact is just one fact the more." - Browning

"The writer writes about the writer." -Unidentified

"Being creative is nothing more than being human." - Barbara Berger

"The quality of emotion is what stays with the reader long after the storyline is gone." - Ellen Howard

"You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel." - Eve Bunting

"Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness." - Ernest Hemingway

"The three greatest skills of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, and conflict." - James Frye

"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." -- Samuel Johnson

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." -- Red Smith

"Remember: MDQ. Your Major Dramatic Question is the question that's formed in the reader's mind at the very beginning of the book in the first chapter, and this question is answered yes or no in your climax." - Pam Conrad

"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you avert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." - Anne Dillard

"The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer." - Katherine Paterson

"He could remember her so well, he thought, and yet when he tried to write about her and being with her, it would come out wrong. Not wrong, exactly, but just not complete. The words worked, but they didn't work right because he didn't know enough about how to use them... The images that came to him were so clear, but when he tried to describe them--no, explain them... and there it was, there was the trouble with it. He wasn't writing about his grandmother. He was explaining her. And that, he thought, was not a way to learn about her, about what she had been to him."
"...The painting is the same [as the writing] because I am trying to paint the wrong thing. I am trying to paint--what? Paint a picture of her, and that is not what I want--I could use a camera if that is all I wanted. No. I do not want a picture of her; I want a picture that is her."- Gary Paulsen (The Island)

"...in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility... What we applaud is not simply survival but the ability to step back, or beyond survival, to organizing the experience - to imaging - to telling the tale." - Katharine Patterson (The Spying Heart)

"No passion is greater than the passion to alter someone else's draft." - H.G. Wells

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." --E.L. Doctorow

"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business." --John Steinbeck

"Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations." --Kurt Vonnegut

"A novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind.

The power of fiction is to create empathy. It lifts you away from your chair and stuffs you gently down inside someone else's own perspective. A newspaper could tell you that one hundred people, say, in an airplane, or in Israel, or in Iraq, have died today. And you can think to yourself, "How very sad," then turn the page and see how the Wildcats fared. But a novel could take just one of those hundred lives and show you exactly how it felt to be that person rising from bed in the morning, watching the desert light on the tile of her doorway and on the curve of her daughter's cheek. You would taste that person's breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine."

From an essay titled "Jabberwocky" by Barbara Kingsolver in High Tide in Tucson.

"The hardest thing in the world is being a critic of your own work. For me time has always been the best critic. If I can put something away and then come back, it's like taking a painting you're working on, turning it upside down, squinting at it, or walking away to get a new view. Time helps you know whether it's worth saving or whether it should be dumped." --Karla Kuskin

"For me writing is a long, hard, painful process, but it is addictive, a pleasure that I seek out actively. My advice to young writers is this: Read a lot. Read to find out what past writers have done. Then write about what you know. Write about your school, your class, about your teachers, your family. That's what I did. Each writer must find his or her own kind of voice. Finally, you have to keep on writing." --Lawrence Yep

"I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice--and if you have no choice, good luck to you. You read as much as you can and write as much as you can. You don't have to be very organized about it unless you are an organized sort of person. But you do have to do it compulsively, convulsively, constantly--and you have to love it, to not be able to live without it. Neither the reading nor the writing is more important than the other. You read to feed your own story-telling faculty; you write to learn how, so that when the story you must get down on paper presents itself to you, you'll be ready. Well, you'll never be ready--the story in your head will always be better than what you write, which is one of the brutal facts about being a writer--but you can make yourself as ready as you can be." --Robin McKinley

"For young people who want to write, I advise them to stick with it. Perseverance is everything. Don't be discouraged by rejections. I wrote forty stories before I sold one. If you like to write, if you've got writing in your blood, you will stay with it no matter what. It may not be easy. But it will be very gratifying." --Matt Christopher

"When I visit schools and talk to students about writing, I give them one word of advice and I give it to them quickly and loudly--FINISH! Starting something is easier than finishing it. You must have discipline to go from a few sentences, to a few paragraphs, to a piece of writing that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Finishing something bridges the difference between someone who has talent and one who does not. My best advice? Apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair--and finish. FINISH! --E. L. Konigsburg

"I believe that if a child has a feel for writing and wants to write, there is an audience. Children should just dive in and go at it. I would encourage children to write about themselves and things that are happening to them. It is a lot easier and they know the subject better if they use something out of their everyday lives as an inspiration. Read stories, listen to stories, to develop an understanding of what stories are all about." --Jean Craighead George

"My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it." --Mary Rodgers

"To me, one of the greatest triumphs in doing a book is to tell the story as simply as possible. My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful. I write with the premise that less is more. Writing is not difficult to me. I read into a tape recorder, constantly dropping a word here and there from my manuscript until I get a minimum amount of words to say exactly what I want to say. Each time I drop a word or two, it brings me a sense of victory!" --Ezra Jack Keats

"Some of my poems just spring up--full bloom! Others can take days, weeks, months. Usually ideas come first, then the poetry takes hold. It is a matter of thought, sound, imagery--all working together in balance to create the effect that I want to convey. Then there are times I know I am going in a wrong direction, and I have to pull back--pull back strongly and start all over. My aim is to focus clearly on a subject, pare down words so there can be nothing extraneous in any of my poems. "Water Lily," a verse containing ten lines with a total of twenty words, was one such poem that just wouldn't work. After almost one hundred versions everything fitted into place.

I would tell children who want to write poetry to write poetry for the fun of it, for the joy of it, for the love of it. And especially for the love of the things you write about, whatever they may be--whether beautiful or ugly, grand or humble, birds of paradise or mosquitoes, stars or mud puddles: All are worthy of being written about if you feel a deep affection for them--or, indeed, if you feel strongly about them in any way at all. But never forget that the subject is as important as your feeling: The mud puddle itself is as important as your pleasure in looking at it or splashing through it. Never let the mud puddle get lost in the poetry--because, in many ways, the mud puddle is the poetry." --Valerie Worth

"Writing is making sense of life." -- Nadine Gordimer

"Writers write to influence their readers...but always, at bottom, to be more themselves." -- Aldous Huxley

"There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world." - John Fowles

"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures." -- Jessamyn West

"Words are all we have." -- Samuel Beckett

PRE-WRITING:

"I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write." -- Aldous Huxley

"I try to know as much as I can about a book before the beginning, but I never know exactly where it's going to end." -- Scott Spencer

"I always know the ending; that's where I start." --Toni Morrison

"I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop."-- Anthony Burgess

"I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth." -- John Barth

CHARACTERIZATION

"I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible." -- John Irving

"If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot." --Phyllis Bottome

"You can never know enough about your characters." -- W. Somerset Maugham

PLOT

"The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again." -- Jane Yolen

"Someone the reader likes overcomes increasingly difficult obstacles to reach an important goal." -- Unknown

"Somebody wants something, and it's hard for them to get it." --Todd Strasser

THEME

"Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again." -- Goethe

"Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself." -- J.F. Stephen

"The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing an old way." -- Richard Harding Davis

"The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out."-- Irwin Shaw

THE TRUTH ABOUT FIRST DRAFTS

"The first draft of anything is shit." --Ernest Hemingway

"Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped." -- Lillian Hellman

"I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging." -- Gore Vidal

"The first draft of a story is the writer's clay." -- Bruce Coville

"Few of us express ourselves well in a first draft. When we revise that early confusion into something clearer, we understand our ideas better. And when we understand our ideas better, we express them more clearly, and when we express them more clearly, we understand them better...and so it goes until we run out of energy, interest, or time." --Joseph M. Williams (1994)

REVISION

"I have rewritten - often several times - every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers." -- Vladimir Nabokov

"I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive." -- Susan Sontag

"It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven." -- Dorothy Parker

"The first draft is the down draft. You just get it down. The second draft is the up draft--you fix it up. The third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see it it's loose or cramped or decayed, or...healthy." --Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

"Here's the way I write a book:

·               I start on the word processor and write as much as I can. Then I print it.

·               I take what I've printed, go sit somewhere else--like the porch--read it, say, "This is terrible," and start working on it.

·               I go back to the word processor, put in the changes, and print it.

·               I take what I've printed, go sit somewhere else, say, "Oh, this is still terrible," and rewrite it.

·               I keep doing this until I say, "This is not as terrible as it used to be," then, "This is getting better," and finally (hopefully), "This is not bad at all."

That's how I do my writing, no matter what kind it is--short stories, essays, novels. And it's worked for thirty years." --Betsy Byars, The Moon and I

"Producing writing is not so much like filling a basin or pool once, but rather getting water to keep flowing through till finally it runs clear." --Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers

WORD CHOICE

"The difference between the right and the not-so-right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." -- Mark Twain

CRITIQUING

"I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise." -- Noel Coward

"A critic is a necessary evil, and criticism is an evil necessity." -- Carolyn Wells

"A good critic is the sorcerer that makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet." --Francois Mauriac

THE BEAUTY OF SIMPLICITY

"In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give to your style." --Sydney Smith

"As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out." -- Mark Twain

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." -- Truman Capote

"If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out." --George Orwell

LOGIC AND CLARITY

"Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible." --Anthony Hawkins

MOOD AND EMOTION

"Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder." -- Raymond Chandler

"The quality of emotion is what stays with the reader long after the storyline is gone." -- Ellen Howard

TRANSITIONS

"Word-carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry: you must join your sentences smoothly." -- Anatole France

THE READING / WRITING CONNECTION

"Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window." --Williams Faulkner

"My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either." --Kevin Henkes

"If you're not a reader you can forget about becoming a writer. If reading is not in place first, the writing will not come. The most effective training for writing is reading. If kids read more they would write better." --Avi

SOME WORDS ABOUT GRAMMAR

"Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong. That is a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady." -- James Thurber

THE FEAR OF NOT BEING GOOD ENOUGH

"Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper." -- Isaac Singer

"It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them." -- Truman Capote

"I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged... I had poems which were rewritten so many time I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out." -- Erica Jong

CLARITY AND LOGIC

"Readers are like sheep. If there's an open gate to the right or the left they will surely go through it."--an unknown writer

Don't write merely to be understood. Write so that you cannot possibly be misunderstood. --Robert Louis Stevenson

CONFERENCING ON WRITING

"We need to resist the urge to "fix." The drafts children produce, especially early in the year, will probably be like misshapen, gluey valentines, and we need to respond to them with the same warmth and trust.

Early drafts require teachers and fellow writers who have the eyes to see what is not yet there...

When a young writer deliberately tries to create an effect, the result is often a little self-conscious and overdone. But why is it so hard for us to glory in what the writer has tried to do, or even in the very fact that the writer has deliberately tried to do something?" --Lucy Calkins

"G.K. Chesterton once said: 'If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.' I live by this philosophy when I teach writing. It seems to me vastly more important that a student try a new technique in her writing, and use it imperfectly, than never try the technique at all." --Ralph Fletcher

"Our job is to ask questions of children so that children internalize these questions and ask them of themselves and their own emerging drafts." --Lucy Calkins

"Writing well has everything to do with being able to read one's own work with an eye toward the unmet possibilities that are there." --Lucy Calkins

THE WRITING PROCESS

"Producing writing is not so much like filling a basin or pool once as it is like getting water to keep flowing through until it finally runs clear." --Peter Elbow

SPECIFIC DETAIL

"Writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete." --Ralph Fletcher

"The bigger the issue, the smaller you write." --Richard Price

"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." -- Kurt Vonnegut

FOCUS

"Write about just one thing, I have said, and there is wisdom in this advice...And yet, there is wisdom also in William Sloane's contrary observation: 'Almost all effective writing above the level of the soup can turns out to be about quite a lot of things fused or laced or linked together.'" --Lucy Calkins

VOICE

"My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart." --Katherine Paterson

"Writing with voice is writing into which someone has breathed. It has that fluency, rhythm, and liveliness that exist naturally in the speech of most people when they are enjoying a conversation...Writing with real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand --the words go deep." --Peter Elbow

"Voice in writing has much to do with an intimacy between the writer and subject: a close distance between author and what is being written about." --Suzanne Gardiner

 

"Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written."
-Anon.

"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research."
-Anon.

"The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything."
-Walter Bagehot

"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it."
-James Bryce

"If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers."
-Irvin S. Cobb

"In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is."
-Geoffrey Cottrell

There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one."
-James T. Farrell

"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."
-Gene Fowler

"The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop."
-Alfred Hitchcock

"Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications."
-Fran Lebowitz

"Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come."
-Montesquieu

 

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
- Letter to Fred J. Hall, 8/10/1892

We write frankly and fearlessly but then we "modify" before we print.
- Life on the Mississippi

It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off.
- "An Author's Soldiering," 1887

Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.
- letter to Bruce Weston Munro, 10/21/1881 (Karanovich collection)

Well, my book is written--let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can't ever be said. And besides, they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 9/22/1889 (referring to Connecticut Yankee)

I wrote the rest of The Innocents Abroad in sixty days and I could have added a fortnight's labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad daylight in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days, the average was more than 3,000 words a day- nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called Following the Equator, my average was 1,800 words a day; here in Florence (1904) my average seems to be 1,400 words per sitting of four or five hours.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.
- Letter to Orion Clemens, 3/23/1878

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
- Letter to Emeline Beach, 2/10/1868

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.
- Letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888; (first printed in The Art of Authorship: Literary Reminiscences, Methods of Work, and Advice to Young Beginners, Personally Contributed by Leading Authors of the Day. Compiled and Edited by George Bainton. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890, pp. 85-88.)

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
- Letter to D. W. Bowser, 3/20/1880

 

Cicero

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."

Mark Twain

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."

 

Benchley, Robert: "It took me fifteen years to discover I had no

talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I

was too famous."

 

Confucius: "When a disciple asked what he would do first to reform

the state, [Confucius] replied: Correct language . . . . If language

is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is

said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains

undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate;

if morals and art deteriorate, justice will go astray; if justice

goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.

Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This

matters above everything." From Analects 13:3.

 

Goethe: "Writing is busy idleness."

 

Thoreau, Henry David: "Books must be read as deliberately and

reservedly as they were written " from Walden