20th-century Journalist Quotes

Ernest Hemingway

George Orwell

José Saramago

Italo Calvino

Alberto Moravia

Julian Assange

Norman Mailer

Washington, D. C. is a city filled with people who believe they are important.

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.

Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else.

Ernest Hemingway

The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men

What no wife of a writer can ever understand, no matter if she lives with him for twenty years, is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

Anthony Sampson

In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor and that is the danger we face today.

I don't like to work with assistants. I'm already one too many; the camera alone would be enough.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.

Gerald Priestland

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.

War, the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

When Solomon said there was a time and a place for everything he had not encountered the problem of parking his automobile.

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

In what way can a revelation be made but by miracles? In none which we are able to conceive.

William S. Paley

Because in this world, there is a line: on one side are the men who cannot get things done, and on the other side are the men who can. And not one in a hundred will cross that line. Will you?

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place.

My enemies, I thank you! You are who trained me to be patient, to respond to the evil with the good and to overlook.

The rich plankton of pop heroes and pop villains on which we Americans are accustomed to feed, the daily media soup of sports figures, ax murderers, politicians, and rock singers, the ever-running river of celebs, heavies, and oddballs that we use to spice up our own relatively humdrum lives has of late become a very watery gruel. Where have all the good guys and bad guys gone? Why does everyone out there look so gray?

Shana Alexander