Great Newspapers Quotes & Sayings

And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them. The — Paulette Jiles

I am going to pick on 'Huffington Post.' A lot of its content is great. They are doing a lot of original content now, but historically, a lot of what they did was aggregation. Newspapers don't want to become that, and yet 'Huffington Post' is incredibly popular. It's incredibly successful. — Charles Duhigg

Harriet, to hide her excitement, had turned to the bookshelves in the corner between the windows and the fireplace. The books, untidily arranged, some standing, some piled on their sides, with newspapers and magazines wedged among them, confused her. There were no sets and a great many were paper-backed. She saw friends - Mr. Dickens was present - and nodding acquaintances - Laurence Sterne, for instance, and Theodore Dreiser - but they were among strangers: Henry Miller, Norman Douglas, Saki, Ronald Firbank, strangers all. — Jack Iams

The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information. — Umberto Eco

I began my effort at improving my flight experiences by reading purposefully during my flights. My airplane reading would often be centered on themes. On some flights I would read only newspapers and magazines, catching up on one particular event. On other flights I would read a short novel, and finishing the entire book during the flight would give me a great thrill, as if I'd just flown a cross-Atlantic mission with Amelia Earhart. — Edwidge Danticat

I am really inspired by writers, and weirdly - respect music journalists, which I think makes me the exception amongst most musicians. I think it's a craft. I think it's been really neglected - sadly. I think about the days of the great legendary rock critics. Who's going to become that when magazines and newspapers don't pay anyone properly or don't seem to respect the history or research that is required? — Emily Haines

If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention — Henry David Thoreau

When we listen to the radio, look at television and read the newspapers we wonder whether universal education has been the great boon that its supporters have always claimed it would be. — Robert M. Hutchins

I think that of all the principles for journalism, the most important is to complicate simple things and simplify complicated things. At first sight, you may think something is simple, but it may conceal a great deal. However, facing a very complex thing, you should find out its essence. -Jin Yongquan — Judy Polumbaum

Death, mademoiselle, unfortunately creates a prejudice. A prejudice in favour of the deceased. I heard what you said just now to my friend Hastings. 'A nice bright girl with no men friends.' You said that in mockery of the newspapers. And it is very true - when a young girl is dead, that is the kind of thing that is said. She was bright. She was happy. She was sweet-tempered. She had not a care in the world. She had no undesirable acquaintances. There is a great charity always to the dead. Do you know what I should like this minute? I should like to find someone who knew Elizabeth Barnard and who does not know she is dead! Then, perhaps, I should hear what is useful to me - the truth. — Agatha Christie

How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the "art of the cinema". One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein
it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art. — Henry Miller

Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news - the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be "political" is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers - at great cost to the rest of your life. — John Irving

It's really an orchestral piece featuring a group and it was quite revolutionary at the time and it in fact, it kicked Deep Purple off as a name in Great Britain because it made all the newspapers. Everyone was writing about us. And there was some confusion as to what kind of band we were after that, which is why Deep Purple in Rock is such a hard unbending album of really furious hard heavy rock. Heavy metal hadn't been invented at that point. — Roger Glover

The newspapers turn a blind eye to how they get their material as long as they have great photographs. — Sienna Miller

People read newspapers far more than they read the Word of God and then we wonder way America is in the mess she's in today. This is the Book that made America great, but since it's been kicked out, we've seen America go under and down. — Lester Roloff

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

It was 1966 by the time I started taking pictures seriously and books, newspapers and magazines of the time were full of great pictures that helped to inspire me. — Fay Godwin

It will be enough to say here that if one of those medieval wars had really gone on without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year, in one of our great modern scientific wars between our great modern industrial empires. But the citizens of the medieval republic were certainly under the limitation of only being asked to die for the things with which they had always lived, the house they inhabited, the shrines they venerated and the rulers and representatives they new; and had not the larger vision calling for them to die for the latest rumours about remote colonies as reported in anonymous newspapers. — G.K. Chesterton

Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese. — Dorothy Day

We're certainly not perfect, and we're not probably even better than anybody else, except that perhaps we are given to certain kinds of contemplation that provide a valuable balance to the knee-jerk reactionary behavior of most of our newspapers and political leaders. Poets are great doubters. — Sam Hamill

But Hitler didn't strive for the annihilation of the Jews - he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning that Jewish influence was too great, that of all the lawyers in Berlin, eighty percent were Jewish. Hitler thought that a small percentage of the people, the Jews, should not be allowed to control the theater, cinema, radio, et cetera. — Franz Von Papen

Printer's ink is the great apostle of progress, whose pulpit is the press. — Horace Greeley

Charity is salt in the wound. It is painful. The state gives charity with the bitter hatred of a victim to his blackmailer. The receiver of free money is subjected to harassment, insult, and profound humiliation. Newspapers are enlisted to heap scorn on the arrogant bastards who choose to beg instead of starve or let their children starve. It is made clear that the poor seek charity as a great and sordid chicanery in which they delight. And there are some who do. As there are people who take delight in sticking hot needles deep into their abdomens, swallow pieces of broken bottles. A special taste. Speaking for humanity in general, the poor accept charity with a shame and loss of self-respect that is truly pitiful. — Mario Puzo

It's still a great, big, beautiful, wonderful world no matter what the headlines of the newspapers are and it's there to be explored. It's there for our children to go out and explore and explore different cultures and learn from it. I never lose hope. — Liam Neeson

Journalism is a great profession. It's complicated now. People talk about the demise of investigative reporting. I was a judge in some award contest recently, and the stuff that is being done by major newspapers, and local, regional papers around the country, is great. Newspapers play an amazing role in our society, and I still think they are important. I'm sorry newspaper circulation is down. Ultimately, the importance of newspapers can't be replaced. — Seymour Hersh

We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don't like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on. — Raymond Chandler

They all live in cities, together, and can act in a body readily and at all times; they give chief employment to the newspapers, and therefore have most of them under their command. The agricultural interest is dispersed over a great extent of country, have little means of intercommunication with each other, and feeling their own strength and will, are conscious that a single exertion of these will at any time crush the machinations against their government. Jefferson — Jon Meacham

[The web] is going to end up being a tremendous advantage, providing we can work out the financial structure. I think we'll see newspapers survive, being printed at home. Or you'll have a local print shop, so that rather than waiting for the newspapers to arrive by truck, which is 30 percent at least of a newspaper's cost, you'll go in and push a button, and it will take your dollar bills without anyone having to be there. And it will print the newspaper for you while you wait. It will take seven minutes. There's a terrific future for print in my view and it gives me great heart. — Harold Evans

The great danger in the South comes precisely from the fact that the public is not informed. Newspapers shirk notoriously their editorial responsibilities and print what they think their readers want. They lean with the prevailing winds and employ every fallacy of logic in order to editorialize harmoniously with popular prejudices. They also keep a close eye on possible economic reprisals from the Councils and the Klans, plus other superpatriotic groups who bring pressure to bear on the newspapers' advertisers. In addition, most adhere to the long-standing conspiracy of silence about anything remotely favorable to the Negro. His achievements are carefully excluded or, when they demand attention, are handled with the greatest care to avoid the impression that anything good the individual Negro does is typical of his race. — John Howard Griffin

The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War. — Kurt Vonnegut

I believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. — Oscar Wilde

What is so great about the times? A.J. has often reflected that, bit by bit, all the best things in the world are being carved away like fat from meat. First, it had been the record stores, and then the video stores, and then newspapers and magazines, and now even the big chain bookstores were disappearing everywhere you looked. From his point of view, the only thing worse than a world with big chain bookstores was a world with NO big chain bookstores. — Gabrielle Zevin

America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. "It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War," he wrote. "We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction." The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. "The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest. — Erik Larson

I have always taken great comfort in newspapers. No matter how horrid an event, there is something in seeing it described in black and white that makes it somehow bearable. — Susan Higginbotham

Best of all, Galignani's, the English bookstore and reading room, a favorite gathering place, stood across the street from the hotel. There one could pass long, comfortable hours with a great array of English and even American newspapers. Parisians were as avid readers of newspapers as any people on earth. Some thirty-four daily papers were published in Paris, and many of these, too, were to be found spread across several large tables. The favorite English-language paper was Galignani's own Messenger, with morning and evening editions Monday through Friday. For the newly arrived Americans, after more than a month with no news of any kind, these and the American papers were pure gold. Of the several circulating libraries in Paris, only Galignani's carried books in English, and indispensable was Galignani's New Paris Guide in English. Few Americans went without this thick little leather-bound volume, fully 839 pages of invaluable insights and information, plus maps. — David McCullough

48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper's stance on the great big headline letters is: You got 'em, you use 'em. — Barbara Kingsolver

I pretended not to notice, but Dad looked sort of deflated there on the edge of my bed. A lost, even humbled look was wandering around his face (quite surprised to be there). Seeing him like this, so un-Dad, made me feel sorry for him - though I didn't let on. His befuddled expression reminded me of those unflattering photographs of presidents The New York Times and other newspapers adored sticking on their front page in order to show the world how the Great Leader looked between the staged waves, the scripted sound-bites, the rehearsed handshakes - not staunch and stately, not even steady, but frail and foolish. And though these candid photographs were amusing, when you actually thought about it, the underlying implication of such a photograph was scary, for they hinted how delicate the balance of our lives, how tenuous our calm little existences, if this was the man in charge. — Marisha Pessl

On the TV and in the newspapers all we hear and read is 'live your life or the terrorists win' and it sounds great, I'm all for that, except my kids won't ask for a bathroom pass because the faculty facilities are on the first floor of the building and the MPs patrolling the second floor won't go downstairs on their shift - so I've got middle school kids afraid to take a piss because there might be a soldier in the stall next to them carrying a loaded M- 16 - but hell yes, I'm all for 'live your life' and screw the terrorists, and screw all the countries who harbor and support them. I'm on board with that, except I've got these kids who stay home now, because they're scared riding a bus with soldiers carrying guns, knowing that one soldier isn't enough, so there's a military truck full of soldiers with even bigger guns following the bus 'just in case. — Tucker Elliot

What will become of us in twenty years' time?" we asked ourselves one evening. Thirty years have passed now. Raymond was guillotined: "Anarchist gangster" (so the newspapers). I came across Jean again in Brussels, a worker and a trade-union organizer, still a fighter for liberty after ten years in jail. Luce has died of tuberculosis, naturally. For my part, I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions a Press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. — Victor Serge

The 'public' - a term often used in America to indicate the great metropolitan newspapers. — Mary Ritter Beard

America's great newspapers have staffs that range from 50 percent to 70 percent of what they were just a few years ago. — Eric Alterman

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 their times. — Thomas Jefferson

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager. — Ernest Hemingway,

We made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers — Robert E.Lee

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh Christianity
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom the windows observe shame keeps you
From entering a church and confessing this morning
You read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloud
That's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapers
There are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteries
Portraits of great men and a thousand different headlines
("Zone") — Guillaume Apollinaire

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England. — Alan Bradley

I believe that a newspaper is a great civic asset and that ownership is best in the hands of foundations or wealthy families that want to own it for reasons other than maximizing profits. I also believe newspapers should remain in local hands. — Eli Broad

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives
when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. — George Eliot

I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them ... This has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit. — Thomas Jefferson

I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film. — Mary Ellen Mark

My great wish is to go on in a strict but silent performance of my duty; to avoid attracting notice, and to keep my name out of the newspapers. — Thomas Jefferson

Simply calling the Great Fire an accident did not satisfy some people, most notably the local newspapers. They demanded a culprit-- — Jim Murphy

My grandfather used to say, "Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad". It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help. — Paul Johnson

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones. — Colum McCann

He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don't. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us. — Peter S. Beagle

Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning. — Felix J. Palma

If political cartoonists continue to rely on newspapers, we may be in serious trouble. It's a very transferable form of journalism, though - it works great on Web sites. — David Horsey

America is a bottom-up society, where new trends and ideas begin in cities and local communities ... My colleagues and I have studied this great country by reading its newspapers. We have discovered that trends are generated from the bottom up. — John Naisbitt

But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead. — Amy Tan

What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books have had their day-the theaters have had their day-the temple of religion has had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all these in the great heaven , and save more from Hell, than all the churches and chapels in New York-besides making money at the same time" "Shakespeare is the great genius of the drama, Scott of the novel, Milton and Byron of the poem, and I mean to be the genius of the newspaper press." James Gordon Bennett, editor ot he New York Herald in 1841 — Daniel Stashower

All his actions had something at once ambitious and conscientious; he drank no wine, but was slightly intoxicated with words. And his face and phrases were on the front page of all the newspapers just then, because he was contesting the safe seat of Sir Francis Verner in the great by-election in the west. — G.K. Chesterton

If the technology hadn't changed, [newspapers would] still be great businesses. Network TV [in its heyday,] anyone could run and do well. If Tom Murphy as running it, you'd do very well, but even your idiot nephew could do well. Fortunately, carbide cutting tools [such as those made by Iscar] don't have these types of substitutes. — Charlie Munger