20th-century Journalist Quotes

Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-today struggles of working people.

The Greatest Generation got to save old tires, dig a Victory Garden and forgo sugar. The Richest Generation is being asked to shop.

Margaret Carlson

Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.

Myra MacPherson

Just as the apparent openness of rectitude will have its hidden places where foul things moulder in the dark, so, in the shadowed lives of those outside the law may sometimes be found concealed honesty and naive ideals.

William McIlvanney

Whatever the individual motives of censors may be, censorship is a form of social control.

Carey McWilliams

Believe me, those great death bed speeches are written ahead of time.

Science and religion were apples and oranges. So the pact said: render unto apples the things that are Caesar's, and unto oranges the things that are God's. Just as the Maya kept two calendars, one profane and one priestly, so Western science and religion fell into two different conceptions of the universe, two different vocabularies.

I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy.

Douglas Edwards

Catholicism is like a bowl of spaghetti, full of different strands. It is only if you eat them all together that it will do you any good.

I had no idea how Stevenson's cases would hold up under close scrutiny. But given what was at stake - nothing less than possible concrete evidence of life after death - weren't they at least worth a visit?

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.

Howard Jacobson

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

John Lanchester

That's what art is: escaping everyday normality, which wants to eat you alive.

In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies. In a Russian comedy, everybody dies, too. But they die happy.

To reform the House of Lords [in 1910] meant to set down in writing a Constitution which for centuries had remained happily unwritten, to conjure a great ghost into the narrow and corruptible flesh of a code.

George Dangerfield

I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of 'living a lie'. I came to believe that other people - even when you think you know them well - are ultimately unknowable.

I don't want to be quoted, and don't quote me that I don't want to be quoted.

Winston Burdett

The Devil himself had probably redesigned Hell in the light of information he had gained from observing airport layouts.

To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

If your lawyers tell you that you have a very good case, you should settle immediately.

Richard Ingrams

Liberals and conservatives disagree over what are the most important sins. For conservatives, the sins that matter are personal irresponsibility, the flight from family life, sexual permissiveness, the failure of individuals to work hard. For liberals, the gravest sins are intolerance, a lack of generosity toward the needy, narrow-mindedness toward social and racial minorities.

It was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn't actually exist at all.

I first fell under the spell of cricket, as every other small boy will have done, by batting and bowling on the nearest available space the moment I got home from school.

Geoffrey Moorhouse