Quotes about journalism and journalists

"Journalism is literature in a hurry."

Arnold, Matthew on journalism and journalists
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"Journalism over here is not only an obsession but a drawback that cannot be overrated. Politicians are frightened of the press, and in the same way as bull-fighting has a brutalizing effect upon Spain (of which she is unconscious), headlines of murder, rape, and rubbish, excite and demoralize the American public."

Asquith, Margot on journalism and journalists   

"The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information, misinformation, misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage."

Bernstein, Carl on journalism and journalists
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"A journalist is a person who has mistaken their calling."

Bismarck, Otto Von on journalism and journalists   

"We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman."

Boorstin, Daniel J. on journalism and journalists   

"I find I journalize too tediously. Let me try to abbreviate."

Boswell, James on journalism and journalists   

"Write the news as if your very life depended on it. It does!"

Broun, Heywood on journalism and journalists   

"Journalism could be described as turning one's enemies into money."

Brown, Craig on journalism and journalists   

"Journalism consists largely in saying Lord James is dead to people who never knew Lord James was alive."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on journalism and journalists
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"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on journalism and journalists
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"People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on journalism and journalists   

"Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce."

Cockburn, Claud on journalism and journalists   

"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once."

Connolly, Cyril on journalism and journalists
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"He types his labored column -- weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn."

Davies, Robertson on journalism and journalists   

"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."

Duras, Marguerite on journalism and journalists   

"Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees."

Duras, Marguerite on journalism and journalists   

"Journalism is organized gossip."

Eggleston, Edward on journalism and journalists
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"In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat."

Evans, Harold on journalism and journalists   

"It was when reporters became journalists and when objectivity gave way to searching for truth, that an aura of distrust and fear arose around the New Journalist."

Geyer, Georgie Anne on journalism and journalists   

"Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it."

Greeley, Horace on journalism and journalists
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"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

Greene, Graham on journalism and journalists
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"If you can't get a job as a pianist in a brothel you become a royal reporter."

Hastings, Max on journalism and journalists   

"Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat -- no matter who killed the meat for him."

Hemingway, Ernest on journalism and journalists   

"Journalism is the entertainment business."

Herbert, Frank on journalism and journalists   

"Our job is like a baker's work -- his rolls are tasty as long as they're fresh; after two days they're stale; after a week, they're covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out."

Kapuscinski, Ryszard on journalism and journalists   

"If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies."

Kraus, Karl on journalism and journalists
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"Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes."

Kraus, Karl on journalism and journalists   

"Every journalist owes tribute to the evil one."

La Fontaine, Jean De on journalism and journalists   

"The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street."

Lamb, Charles on journalism and journalists   

"More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth."

Lapham, Lewis H. on journalism and journalists   

"The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak."

Lichtenberg, Georg C. on journalism and journalists   

"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."

Liebling, A. J. on journalism and journalists   

"What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height."

Livingstone, Ken on journalism and journalists   

"Opinionated writing is always the most difficult... simply because it involves retaining in the cold morning-after crystal of the printed word the burning flow of molten feeling."

Lyall, Gavin on journalism and journalists   

"If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist."

Mailer, Norman on journalism and journalists   

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Malcolm, Janet on journalism and journalists   

"The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others."

Malcolm, Janet on journalism and journalists   

"I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column."

Marquis, Don on journalism and journalists   

"The real news is bad news."

Mcluhan, Marshall on journalism and journalists   

"I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth."

Niebuhr, Reinhold on journalism and journalists