American Newspaper Quotes & Sayings

the Christian Science Monitor and the AP. I wrote to the photo desk of the New York Times several times, offering myself up as a stringer, and each time my e-mail went unanswered. I wrote directly to the New York Times correspondents based in India and asked if I could shoot anything for them. They told me they took their own pictures while on assignment. I would keep trying. I felt that if I could only shoot for the New York Times - to me, the newspaper that most influenced American foreign policy and that employed the world's best journalists - I would reach the pinnacle of my career. — Lynsey Addario

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen. — Irving Babbitt

The following year, on June 20, 1947, not suspecting what was about to happen, Bugsy Siegel was sitting on a couch in the living room of Virginia Hill's home at 810 Linden Drive in Beverly Hills. As he was reading a newspaper, an assassin fired a number of shots, from a rifle, through the front window. Siegel was shot twice in the head, with one bullet exiting his skull near the bridge of his nose, causing his left eye to be blown out of its socket. He was also hit twice in the torso. His death was instantaneous and the graphic photos of his bullet-riddled body made headline news. Although there were enough suspects to go around, Eddie Cannizzaro, the "Cat Man," a connected west coast mobster, made a deathbed confession that he was the one who carried out the contract. Although the case isn't closed, it is cold and will most likely remain so, as it rests on the desk of Detective Les Zoeller of the Los Angeles Police Department. — Hank Bracker

North American newspapers are entering into commercial printing in a way that is somewhat different from taking in traditional commercial jobs: they are subcontracting to print other newspapers that have chosen not to upgrade their print capabilities. This is creating a profit-centre environment at many newspapers, both those that contract out and those that contract in requiring added capacity and more colour at the newspaper taking the contract. — Eric Bell

MAURY: What is a gentleman, anyway? ANTHONY: A man who never has pins under his coat lapel. MAURY: Nonsense! A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich. DICK: He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper. RACHAEL: A man who never gives an impersonation of a dope-fiend. MAURY: An American who can fool an English butler into thinking he's one. MURIEL: A man who comes from a good family and went to Yale or Harvard or Princeton, and has money and dances well, and all that. MAURY: At last - the perfect definition! Cardinal Newman's is now a back number. — F Scott Fitzgerald

American newspaper?" "The Tribune, general." Dornberger — James Follett

The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla. — Edward Dahlberg

slavery is rarely taught in schools, and our understanding of its scope is barely rudimentary. The mainstream of American thought still does not contain a shared body of information on slavery even though the facts about American enslavement are widely available. Several years after that first spring, when I began to speak publicly about the book that had come forward from a newspaper project on slavery in the North (Complicity), I was asked the same question over and over, by audiences around the country: "Why don't we know about this? — Anne Farrow

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news. — Marshall McLuhan

I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper grey censorship of all our real human values ... — Jack Kerouac

I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I'm not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers. — Daniel Woodrell

Our great American writers were all newspaper people. — John Gould

The decision to rely heavily on high-altitude air power, target urban infrastructure and repeatedly attack heavily populated towns and villages has reflected a deliberate trade-off of the lives of American pilots and soldiers, not with those of their declared Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians ... There will be no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no newspaper obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime minister, as there were for the victims of the twin towers. — Seumas Milne

Throughout all ranks of society, from the successful merchant, which is the highest, to the domestic serving man, which is the lowest, they are all too actively employed to read, except at such broken moments as may suffice for a peep at a newspaper. It is for this reason, I presume, that every American newspaper is more or less a magazine ... — Frances Trollope

They exchanged notes, like children. My grandfather made his out of newspaper clippings and dropped them in her woven baskets, into which he knew only she would dare stick a hand. Meet me under the wooden bridge and I will show you things you have never, ever seen. The "M" was taken from the army that would take his mother's life: GERMAN FRONT ADVANCES ON SOVIET BORDER; the "eet" from their approaching warships: NAZI FLEET DEFEATS FRENCH AT LESACS; the "me" from the peninsula they were blue-eyeing: GERMANS SURROUND CRIMEA; the "und" from too little, too late: AMERICAN WAR FUNDS REACH ENGLAND; the "er" from the dog of dogs: HITLER RENDERS NONAGGRESSION PACT INOPERATIVE ... and so on, and so on, each note a collage of love that could never be, and a war that could — Jonathan Safran Foer

Town after town has but one newspaper or one radio station. It is often owned by Murdoch. Yes, we don't have as much freedom of the press as we think we have - although the traditional freedom of speech is strongly rooted in American culture. — Pete Seeger

I remember that a Korak once brought to me an old tattered fashion-plate from "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper," containing three or four full-length figures of imaginary ladies, in the widest expansion of crinoline which fashion at that time prescribed. The poor Korak said he had often wondered what those curious objects could be; and now, as I was an American, perhaps I could tell him. He evidently had not the most remote suspicion that they were intended to represent human beings. I told him that those curious objects, as he called them, were American women. He burst out into a "tyee-e-e-e" of amazement, and asked with a wondering look, "Are all the women in your country as big as that at the bottom?" It was a severe reflection upon our ladies' dress, and I did not venture to tell him that the bigness was artificial, but merely replied sadly that they were. — George Kennan

Most assuredly that spirit of envious rivalry and depreciating criticism in which many English travellers have written, is greatly to be deprecated, no less than the tone of servile adulation which some writers have adopted; but our American neighbours must recollect that they provoked both the virulent spirit and the hostile caricature by the way in which some of their most popular writers of travels have led an ungenerous onslaught against our institutions and people, and the bitter tone in which their newspaper press, headed by the Tribune, indulges towards — Isabella L. Bird

Cheerios
One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago
as I waited for my eggs and toast,
I opened the Tribune only to discover
that I was the same age as Cheerios.
Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios
for today, the newspaper announced,
was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios
whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.
Already I could hear them whispering
behind my stooped and threadbare back,
Why that dude's older than Cheerios
the way they used to say
Why that's as old as the hills,
only the hills are much older than Cheerios
or any American breakfast cereal,
and more noble and enduring are the hills,
I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice. — Billy Collins

You know when i was a little kid in oregon i didn't feel that i was and american at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when i discovered buddhism and all i suddenly felt that i had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of the faults and sins in that lifetime i was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in america where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom. — Jack Kerouac

I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. — Don DeLillo

Certainly the most obvious ... example of the strictly infantile essence of America's all-conquering mentality greets our eyes daily, anywhere and everywhere, in the guise of the tabloid newspaper. The tabloid newspaper actually means to the typical American of the era what the Bible is popularly supposed to have meant to the typical Pilgrim Father: viz. a very present help in times of trouble, plus a means of keeping out of trouble via harmless, since vicarious, indulgence in the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. — E. E. Cummings

As the war went on, opposition grew. The American Peace Society printed a newspaper, the Advocate of Peace, which published poems, speeches, petitions, sermons against the war, and eyewitness accounts of the degradation of army life and the horrors of battle. The abolitionists, speaking through William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, denounced the war as one "of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine - marked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity ... " Considering the strenuous efforts of the nation's leaders to build patriotic support, the amount of open dissent and criticism was remarkable. Antiwar meetings took place in spite of attacks by patriotic mobs. — Howard Zinn

I read in a newspaper that I was to be received with all the honors customarily rendered to a foreign ruler. I am grateful for the honors; but something within me rebelled at that word 'foreign'. I say this because when I have been in Canada, I have never heard a Canadian refer to an American as a 'foreigner'. He is just an 'American'. And, in the same way, in the United States, Canadians are not 'foreigners', they are 'Canadians'. That simple little distinction illustrates to me better than anything else the relationship between our two countries. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. — Gore Vidal

For nearly a decade, their secret remained safe. Rumors of a lab study devoted to sex, operating in the heart of St. Louis, never appeared on television or radio or in print. As a personal favor to Masters, St. Louis Globe-Democrat publisher Richard Amberg vowed his daily newspaper wouldn't breathe a word to its readers. The city's other competing paper, owned by Pulitzer, stayed mum. Reporters for the Associated Press and United Press International, the two wire services beaming scoops across the world, also knew of this sensational human experiment but refused to say anything to the American public. — Thomas Maier

To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. — Eric Alterman

Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer. — Ben Bagdikian

My agent pointed out one day that I had been quoted by a columnist in some American newspaper, and he noted with some glee that they simply identified me by name without reminding people who I was, apparently in the clear expectation that their readers would know who I am. — Terry Pratchett

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be.[ ... ]We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death."
Can you imagine that?
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield. — Kurt Vonnegut

We've got a bozo who likes rubbing fear and lies in people's faces. He's the only media source in town except us. Who are we writing for?"
Elizabeth waved her hand emotionally. "The American people!"
Baker clasped his brow. "Let's narrow that."
Darrell stood. "We're writing for the community."
"And they deserve the facts," Baker warned. "Don't ever forget it. — Joan Bauer

One American newspaper wholesaler told The New York Times that the Indians basically replaced the old Jewish and Italian merchants and they've filled a tremendous void because nobody will put in the fourteen and sixteen-hour days that they do quite willingly and that you have to put in when running a newsstand. — Shashi Tharoor

And don't think that by eating freedom fries you are being patriotic and helping the war effort. Use less gasoline, read a newspaper. You know what, how about we cool it with the freedom fries anyway you fat asses. We're the fattest country in the world. Have you ever walked around an American mall? It's nothing but chick fillets and Lane Bryant track suits busting at the seams. — Tina Fey

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment. — Edward Bernays

An important document of the paper of record at a crucial, make-or-break juncture in its long, glorious history, and a love letter to the dying art form that is the great American newspaper. — Nathan Rabin

Oh man, there's no shortage of craziness happening on the American landscape right now. I'll turn on the TV every day or check out the newspaper, and there is something to find humor in or something to find absolute fear in. Either way, it makes for good comedy. — Jordan Klepper

That church . . . it reminds me of one in downtown Chicago. Do you remember? That beautiful one with the courtyard near the Drake."
Jeremy took a newspaper from a stack behind him and sat across from me. "I know the one you're talking about, but that church," he gestured out the window, "is older than America."
I sighed. "Of course it is. Did I really just try to compare British and American architecture? How insensitive of me. — Jessica Martinez

...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day's newspaper. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse, 10 times as ignorant, 10 times as unfair and tyrannical, 10 times as complaisant and pusillanimous, and 10 times as devious, hypocritical, disingenuous, deceitful, pharisaical, Pecksniffian, fraudulent, slippery, unscrupulous, perfidious, lewd and dishonest. — H.L. Mencken

The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious. — Tom Wolfe

A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly. — B.J. Ward