Claud Cockburn Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

He [Brendan Bracken] had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig.

Claud Cockburn
A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands.

Claud Cockburn
There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep.

Claud Cockburn
An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.

Claud Cockburn
Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way its supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy around its neck.

Claud Cockburn
Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.

Claud Cockburn
A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's.

Claud Cockburn
Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead."

Claud Cockburn
I had occasion, not for the first time, to thank heaven for that state of mind which cartographers seek to define as Scotland.

Claud Cockburn
The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business – advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.

Claud Cockburn
If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment.

Claud Cockburn
Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied".

Claud Cockburn
What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power or influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly. It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a picture of themselves as so very sagacious, honest and well-intentioned.

Claud Cockburn
One good reason for the popularity of "reductionism" among the philosophical outposts of the Western Establishment is that it can be, and is, used as a device for trying to take the wind, so to speak, out of the sails of Marxism.... In essence reductionism is a kind of anti-Marxist caricature of Marxist determinism. It is what anti-Marxists pretend that Marxist determinism is.

Claud Cockburn