Murdoch Quotes & Sayings

If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together. ... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But, the most important thing is, even if we're apart ... I'll always be with you. — Emily Murdoch

We've got to lift our game tremendously. We'll sell our business news and information in print, we'll sell it to anyone who's got a cable system, and we'll sell it on the Web. — Rupert Murdoch

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central. — Iris Murdoch

I know so many words. It's perplexing to come across so many I don't. — Emily Murdoch

Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet."

"Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end."

"So the critics are just stupid?"

"It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can. — Iris Murdoch

Stuart Murdoch is a really special human being - really creative, but also really kind and gentle. — Hannah Murray

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines. — Iris Murdoch

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word. — Iris Murdoch

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal. — Iris Murdoch

The cry of equality pulls everyone down. — Iris Murdoch

You don't respect me," said Dora, her voice trembling.
"Of course I don't respect you," said Paul. "Have I any reason to? I'm in love with you, unfortunately, that's all."
"Well, it's unfortunate for me too," said Dora, starting to cry. — Iris Murdoch

It's time to believe in what you know. — Alexi Murdoch

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits. — Iris Murdoch

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after. — Iris Murdoch

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. — Iris Murdoch

Notoriously, in 1975, Murdoch abused his position as a newspaper owner to support a plot that ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, who had dared to wander away from the mogul's path. — Nick Davies

Bury your mistakes. — Rupert Murdoch

When I'm up to something I find it very hard to realize that I probably look no different from the way I look on other occasions. — Iris Murdoch

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous. — Iris Murdoch

He felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls. — Iris Murdoch

Art and morality are, with certain provisos ... one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. — Iris Murdoch

Some of our businesses use more energy than others, but our strategy everywhere is the same.. first, reduce our use of energy as much as possible. Then, switch to renewable sources of power where it makes economic sense. And, over time, as a last resort, offset the emissions we can't avoid. — Rupert Murdoch

Connectivity doesn't just mean you get a lot more chances to deliver messages about customer service and pricing plans. This isn't one-sided. It enables people to talk back. — James Murdoch

But it's like the feeling you get at the end of a book you love. — Stuart Murdoch

My grandmother died in childbirth, and my great-aunt lived with us. She had bound feet. She never knew how to read or write. — Wendi Deng Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch is the most dangerous man in the world. — Ted Turner

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect. — Iris Murdoch

Is there any other industry [than the press] in this country which seeks to presume so completely to give the customer what he does not want? — Rupert Murdoch

The industry is littered with self-styled purists who believe the business of media.. the requirement to make a profit.. somehow corrupts the craft. — Lachlan Murdoch

A jacketless Murdoch resumes his quiz, brushing off the assault as 'an overexcited autograph-hunter wanting to have his shaving foam signed. — Andy Zaltzman

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise? — Iris Murdoch

I hate her with the fury of gasoline set on fire. I burn for Jenessa, who deserves better than this, better than some screwed-up, drug-addicted mother, better than this chaos that always seems to find us, rubbin' off on us like some horrible rash. — Emily Murdoch

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
— Iris Murdoch

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. — Iris Murdoch

I believe if you are nice to people, children will follow. Likewise, if you are rude to people, children will follow. — Wendi Deng Murdoch

She tells so many different stories and they are all false. — Iris Murdoch

Murdoch paid too much for the Wall Street Journal even when he didn't have any competition. — Sumner Redstone

The next day round about ten o'clock I was walking down Welbeck Street. I was in a bad temper. By daylight the whole project seemed very much less attractive. I felt that to be snubbed by a film star would put me in a bad state of mind for months. But I regarded the matter as something which had been decided and which now simply had to be carried out. I often used this method for deciding difficult cases. In stage one I entertain the thing purely as a hypothesis, and in stage two I count my stage one thinking as a fixed decision on which there is no going back. I recommend this technique to any of you who are not good at making decisions. — Iris Murdoch

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. — Iris Murdoch

I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself. — Iris Murdoch

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear. — Iris Murdoch

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously. — Iris Murdoch

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality. — Rupert Murdoch

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young. — Iris Murdoch

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom — Iris Murdoch

White magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. — Iris Murdoch

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing. — Iris Murdoch

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge. — Iris Murdoch

Monopoly is a terrible thing, till you have it. — Rupert Murdoch

Online advertising is increasingly only a fraction of what is being lost from print advertising, and it is under constant pressure. — Rupert Murdoch

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart ... — Iris Murdoch

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling. — Iris Murdoch

The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks. — Rupert Murdoch

Most real relationships are involuntary. — Iris Murdoch

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all. — Iris Murdoch

What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice. — Iris Murdoch

My father left me with a clear sense that the media was something different. — Rupert Murdoch

At News Corporation, we have a history of challenging media orthodoxies. — Rupert Murdoch

I have never asked a prime minister for anything — Rupert Murdoch

How had things gone so terribly wrong? She wasn't supposed to be returning to Murdoch House in defeat, and she most certainly was not supposed to be returning alone.

Lilly should be there. And Gideon. High-handed, muleheaded, wonderful Gideon. She'd never admitted it, not even to herself, but a part of her had expected him to come back to Murdoch House with her. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that no part of her had been able to imagine going back without him. — Alissa Johnson

Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. — Iris Murdoch

When he looks at her, I can tell his eyes are locked on something in the past
something that seared deeply and left the worst kind of scar: the inside kind. — Emily Murdoch

Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us. — Iris Murdoch

I try to keep in touch with the details ... I also look at the product daily. That doesn't mean you interfere, but it's important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what's happening. — Rupert Murdoch

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. — Iris Murdoch

We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention. — Iris Murdoch

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods. — Iris Murdoch

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern ... — Iris Murdoch

time. Some of my friends think that Finn is cracked, but — Iris Murdoch

What makes a media company successful is how it copes with competitive markets in which people have a choice. Competition today is at a more intense level than it has ever before been because the barriers to providing information in the virtual world are so low and the choice of provider nearly infinite. — James Murdoch

As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer's mind. — Iris Murdoch

I didn't ever plan to be a producer, and I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. — Wendi Deng Murdoch

The Murdoch-owned 'Sunday Times' has an appalling history of involvement in illegal activity. And it's because they're Sunday papers; they're trying to get scoops that the dailies haven't got. — Nick Davies

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled [..] So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance. — Douglas Adams

What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school? — Iris Murdoch

What you really are afraid of is that you're competing against somebody who is rich and irrational. I mean, it used to be a given, a saying in the industry: Don't ever bid against Rupert Murdoch for anything Rupert wants, because if you win you lose. You will have paid way too much. — John C. Malone

An experience is richest not talked of. — Iris Murdoch

My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it. — Rupert Murdoch

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion. — Iris Murdoch

Why do you need to drive a Ferrari to get stuck in a traffic jam anyway? How do people afford these cars? — James Murdoch

Satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels. — Rupert Murdoch

My children speak very good Chinese, and they translate for our American friends. — Wendi Deng Murdoch

There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good. — Iris Murdoch

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. — Iris Murdoch

Color my life with the chaos of trouble,
'cause anythings better than posh isolation.
I missed the bus, you were laid on your back
with the boy from the Arab strap,
the boy with the Arab strap — Stuart Murdoch

[In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay. — John Desmond Bernal

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness. — Iris Murdoch

People knew that Murdoch's media estate in the UK was too powerful and it was doing very unpleasant things. — Meredith Whitney

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. — Iris Murdoch

It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me. — Iris Murdoch

The self-anointed media elite among us believe, somewhat self-servingly, that not only the act, or process of making a profit is positively sinister, but also that the very desire to do so is. — Lachlan Murdoch

Warmth stole into Murdoch's voice at the memory, and Farah's heart clenched at the picture of her Dougan not yet a man, and yet not a boy, regaling a room full of hardened prisoners about the graveyard capers and bog adventures of a ten-year-old girl in the Scottish Highlands. "He described ye so many times, I feel as though any of us would have recognized ye had we seen ye on the streets. He told us of yer kindness, yer innocence, yer gentle ways and boundless curiosity. Ye became something of a patron saint to us all. Our daughter. Our sister. Our... Fairy. Without even knowing it, ye gave us- him- a little bit of sunshine and hope in a world of shadow and pain. — Kerrigan Byrne

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out. — Iris Murdoch

Every artist is an unhappy lover. — Iris Murdoch

News - communicating news and ideas, I guess - is my passion. And giving people alternatives so that they have two papers to read (and) alternative television channels. — Rupert Murdoch

Confession ran in the family. — Iris Murdoch

I had never been in a supermarket before coming to America. At home, my parents wouldn't let me open the refrigerator, because they worried I'd damage the door by opening it too many times. — Wendi Deng Murdoch

Believe me, it would be a long, long, cold day before I decide to warm up next to Rupert Murdoch. — Irwin Winkler

Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection. — Iris Murdoch

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge. — Iris Murdoch