19th-century Publisher Quotes

Joseph Pulitzer
William Randolph Hearst
Robert Chambers
Nathaniel Parker Willis
Dwight L. Moody
Charles Taze Russell
Alice Meynell

And the wild hare brings forth her young
On the hearthstone of the Gael.

The deliverance of the saints must take place some time before 1914.

Charles Taze Russell
Charles Taze Russell
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.

Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor; and the traveller is therefore recommended to visit Cambridge first, or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.

Karl Baedeker
Karl Baedeker
The value of life deepens incalculably with the privileges of travel.

Nathaniel Parker Willis
Nathaniel Parker Willis
Who was it who said, 'I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish.'? Whoever it was, I agree with him.

More than one newspaper has been ruined by the brilliant writer in the editor's chair.

I think Hemingway's [book] titles should be awarded first prize in any contest. Each of them is a poem, and their mysterious power over readers contributes to Hemingway's success. His titles have a life of their own, and they have enriched the American vocabulary.

'It's better'n a Christmas,' they told their mother, 'to get ready for it!'

Margaret Sidney
Margaret Sidney
There are two kinds of men who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else.

Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis
Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly and applying unsuitable remedies.

[Scientists are] so blamed wise and so packed full of knowledge that they cannot comprehend why God has made nearly all the rest of mankind so infernally stupid.

E. W. Scripps
E. W. Scripps
Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the artshave broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.

No substance in nature, as far as yet known, has, when it reaches the brain, such power to induce mental and moral changes of a disastrous character as alcohol. Its transforming power is marvelous, and often appalling. It seems to open a way of entrance into the soul for all classes of foolish, insane or malignant spirits, who, so long as it remains in contact with the brain, are able to hold possession.

The Americans who came across the plains in covered wagons and those who followed the trail later in trains drawn by the iron horse were interested in home ownership and a new life. Especially was this true of the Negro pioneers. They knew it was not a case of starting again. For them it was the dawn of a new life in an atmosphere of freedom.

Charlotta Bass
Charlotta Bass
An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.

George Haven Putnam
George Haven Putnam
My experience has proved that a man who is running for office, and is not willing to make his honest opinions known to the public, either has no honest opinions or is not honest about them.

William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
Friends are like fiddle strings; they must not be screwed too tight.

Success is not to be gained by a blind and slavish following of anyone's rules or advice, our own any more than any other person's. There is no royal road to success- no patent process by which the unsuccessful are to be magically transformed.... Rules and advice may greatly assist-and they undoubtedly do this-but the real work must be accomplished by the individual. He or she must carve out his or her own destiny.

I have been induced to adopt this course by a desire that my readers should be taught to think as well as to experiment, and thus be qualified at an early part of their study to discriminate between the true and the false, and acquire the facts of the science without being mystified by its fictions.

The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in a letter or told to an acquaintance.

Advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news it is worthless.

Adolph Ochs
Adolph Ochs
Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow.

Alice Meynell
Alice Meynell
Meek and lowly, pure and holy,
Chief among the "blessed three."