Thomas Jefferson Newspaper Quotes & Sayings

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it. — Thomas Jefferson

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

You know well that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the [government] ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. — Thomas Jefferson

The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper. — Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States memorably stated in a letter in 1807: 'nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle...Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first, Truths; second, Probabilities; the third, Possibilities; the fourth, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.' If that was true as far back as 1807 when the technologies supporting the mass media were markedly less advanced - how much more true it is today. The — Jason Carter

A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies serves like headlands to correct our course. Indeed, my scepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one. — Thomas Jefferson

Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty ... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read. — Thomas Jefferson

Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander. — Karl Rove

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, in-as-much as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors. — Thomas Jefferson