A.J. Liebling Quotes & Sayings

I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy. — A.J. Liebling

Up there in my retreat, I feel the city calling to me. It winks at me with its myriad eyes, and I go out and get stiff as a board. I seek out companionship, and if I do not find friends, I make them. A wonderful, grand old Babylon. — A.J. Liebling

An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed. — A.J. Liebling

Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place. — A.J. Liebling

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. — A.J. Liebling

The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels. — A.J. Liebling

The way to write is well, and how is your own business. — A.J. Liebling

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
— A.J. Liebling

I can write better than anyone who can write faster, — A.J. Liebling

Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments. — A.J. Liebling

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and i can write faster than anybody who can write better. — A.J. Liebling

To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris. — A.J. Liebling

Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative. — A.J. Liebling

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor. — A.J. Liebling

I met a keen observer who gave me a tip: 'If you run across a restaurant where you often see priests eating with priests, or sporting girls with sporting girls, you may be confident that it is good. Those are two classes of people who like to eat well and get their money's worth.' — A.J. Liebling

The pattern of a newspaperman's life is like the plot of 'Black Beauty.' Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings. — A.J. Liebling

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten. — A.J. Liebling

No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane. — A.J. Liebling

A Louisiana politician can't afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department. — A.J. Liebling

In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiner's Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island Duck, he might have written a masterpiece. — A.J. Liebling

If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior. — A.J. Liebling

I can only surmise about what Liebling would make of today's pugilistic dark ages. In his era, fighters fought rematches of close fights, even title fights, almost automatically. Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta met six times, inconceivable for champions today. In the 1950s a quality pro thought himself underemployed if he had only eight or ten bouts a year, and the amateur scene was thriving. Nowadays pros who make a living from boxing are about as common as Yetis, and amateurs can't get enough fights to learn the rudiments of the craft. — A.J. Liebling

It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life. — A.J. Liebling

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business. — A.J. Liebling

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience. — A.J. Liebling

Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted. — A.J. Liebling

I used to be shy about ordering a steak after I had eaten a steak sandwich, but I got used to it. — A.J. Liebling

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

The sight of a pretty woman had an airborne chemical effect, like nerve gas. It relaxed the rubber band around his wallet. — A.J. Liebling

News is like the tilefish which appears in great schools off the Atlantic Coast some years and then vanishes, no one knows whither or for how long. Newspapers might employ these periods searching for the breeding grounds of news, but they prefer to fill up with stories about Kurdled Kurds or Calvin Coolidge, until the banks close or a Hitler marches, when they are as surprised as their readers. — A.J. Liebling

Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. — A.J. Liebling

What a madly gay little wine, my dear!" M. Cliquot said, repressing, but not soon enough, a grimace of pain.
"One would say a Tavel of a good year," I cried, "if one were a complete bloody fool." I did not say the second clause aloud.
My old friend looked at me with a new respect. He was discovering in me a capacity for hypocrisy that he had never credited me with before. — A.J. Liebling

It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum. — A.J. Liebling

He felt a giant among pygmies, a pike among crappies, as he stood there among the legislators, most of whom owed him for flavors - special bills passed for their law clients, state jobs for constituents, " contributions" for their personal campaign funds, and so on. — A.J. Liebling

The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young. — A.J. Liebling

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass. — A.J. Liebling

What an epithet can be derived from that - "Frivolous philologist!" For thirty years I have been waiting for a chance to use it, but every time I get into an argument with a savant, he turns out to be of some other persuasion - a psychologist, perhaps, or a podiatrist. The neck my knife would fit has never presented itself. — A.J. Liebling

The fighter (like the writer) must stand alone. If he loses he cannot call an executive conference and throw off on a vice president or the assistant sales manager. He is consequently resented by fractional characters who cannot live outside an organization. — A.J. Liebling

If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total. — A.J. Liebling

In the youth of middle age
square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile
... — A.J. Liebling

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. — A.J. Liebling

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

Boxing has always been a primarily urban pastime (whereas the defining suburban sport is auto-racing, in which the machine and its anonymous mechanics hold far greater importance than the driver). When white Americans left the cities, they left boxing as well. — A.J. Liebling

If a boxer ever went as crazy as Nijinsky all the wowsers in the world would be screaming 'punch-drunk.' Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn't there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs — A.J. Liebling

If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it. — A.J. Liebling