JOURNALISM QUOTES
quotations about journalism
My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The Common Reader
The duty of journalists is to tell the truth. Journalism means you go back to the actual facts, you look at the documents, you discover what the record is, and you report it that way.
NOAM CHOMSKY
interview, "Lecture: Noam Chomsky", Bullpen: NYU Journalism
Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault.
HENRY ANATOLE GRUNWALD
Time Magazine's 60th anniversary issue, Fall 1983
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.
G.K. CHESTERTON
All Things Considered
Journalism is a function, like going to the lavatory, best done at home and not talked about.
JEFFREY BERNARD
Low Life: Irreverent Reflections from the Bottom of a Glass
Journalism is merely history's first draft.
GEOFFREY C. WARD
attributed, Get Published Today! No More Rejections
We journalists are seducers, except it's not sex we're after (usually). It's sound bites and quotes and information.
ERIC WEINER
The Geography of Bliss
Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.
SCOTT ADAMS
The Dilbert Principle
The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The American Democrat
Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working.
JEFFREY BERNARD
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Zingers
Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H.L. MENCKEN
quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
BEN HECHT
quoted in Jewish Wit and Wisdom
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Enemies of Promise
If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Atlantic Monthly, Sep. 17, 1997
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
ELLEN GOODMAN
Boston Globe, 1993
Journalism is a career which demands the highest professionalism. It demands responsibility as well, for the line between honest revelation and disingenuous sensationalism is sometimes perilously thin.
MARGARET THATCHER
speech at the Zambian Press Association Awards
How shall I speak thee, or thy power address Thou God of our idolatry, the Press.... Like Eden's dead probationary tree, Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.
WILLIAM COWPER
Progress of Error
It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Ball and the Cross
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Zingers