Alexander Cockburn Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost — the lost valleys of the imagination.

Alexander Cockburn
Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.

Alexander Cockburn
The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

Alexander Cockburn
The weapon of the advocate is the sword of the soldier, not the dagger of the assassin.

Alexander Cockburn
A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.

Alexander Cockburn
There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend.

Alexander Cockburn
A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

Alexander Cockburn
No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.

Alexander Cockburn
The arms which an advocate wields he ought to use as a warrior, not as an assassin. He ought to uphold the interests of his clients per fas, not per nefas. He ought to know how to reconcile the interests of his clients with the eternal interests of truth and justice.

Alexander Cockburn
We all have to go one day, but pray God let it not be over Afghanistan. An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world. I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too.

Alexander Cockburn
No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

Alexander Cockburn
No one believes for a moment the embargo will prompt the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein.

Alexander Cockburn