20th-century Publisher Quotes

Stan Lee

Hugh Hefner

John F. Kennedy Jr.

Dave Eggers

Larry Flynt

Henry Luce

Nizar Qabbani

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown.... It is a city that offers me more people — more different kinds of people — than I could otherwise possibly have come to know in a lifetime: the native Washingtonian, the local merchant, the foreign diplomat, the ever-present tourist, the public servant, the journalist, the president, the friend.

Katharine Graham

They (fans) respond mostly to what WWE trains them to respond to. An ankle lock gets over because Kurt Angle does the ankle lock and everyone submits to it. A triangle by Undertaker doesn't get over because WWE has never trained the fans to accept that as a finish because no one ever taps to it. And it was the same thing when Shamrock was in WWE.

I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public-policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator.

Because I really care about homosexuals…and I want them to know that they will face a horrible judgment.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.

When you don't want something enough to make the effort, making an effort is a waste.

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read.

MARVEL IS A CORNUCOPIA OF FANTASY, A WILD IDEA, A SWASHBUCKLING ATTITUDE, AN ESCAPE FROM THE HUMDRUM AND PROSAIC. IT'S A SERENDIPITOUS FEAST FOR THE MIND, THE EYE, AND THE IMAGINATION, A LITERATE CELEBRATION OF UNBRIDLED CREATIVITY, COUPLED WITH A TOUCH OF REBELLION AND AN INSOLENT DESIRE TO SPIT IN THE EYE OF THE DRAGON.

The most important of the beat poets. He was a really true poet with an original voice, probably the most lyrical of those poets.

We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat.

On journalism

Arthur Hays Sulzberger

I am prepared to accept from others their own version of reality. I think it is a basic freedom really, to create one's own reality from whatever truths are available.

People assume you slept your way to the top. Frankly, I couldn't sleep my way to the middle.

I'm also told that the latest popular game in America is called Incest—all the family can join in!

Rupert Hart-Davis

Barbara Walters: What would be your first act on becoming President?
John F. Kennedy Jr.: Call Uncle Teddy and gloat.

John F. Kennedy Jr.

Love doesn't just drop on you unexpectedly; you have to give off signals, sort of like an amateur radio operator.

Helen Gurley Brown

Some weeks later the Einsteins were taken to the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California. Mrs. Einstein was particularly impressed by the giant telescope.

Let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

Intelligence, like fire, is a power that is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring, from its application.

Authors are easy enough to get on with – if you are fond of children.

Michael Joseph (publisher)

The world of the 20th century, if it is to come to life in any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American century.

Our shouting is louder than our actions,
Our swords are taller than us,
This is our tragedy.
In short
We wear the cape of civilization
But our souls live in the stone age.

The major civilizing force in the world is not religion, it's sex.

A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets.