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More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.
-Lewis H. Lapham
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The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
-A. J. Liebling
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What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height.
-Ken Livingstone
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Opinionated writing is always the most difficult... simply because it involves retaining in the cold morning-after crystal of the printed word the burning flow of molten feeling.
-Gavin Lyall
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If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
-Norman Mailer
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Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
-Janet Malcolm
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The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.
-Janet Malcolm
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I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.
-Don Marquis
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The real news is bad news.
-Marshall McLuhan
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A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times?
-Bill Moyers
Channel Maker, February 29, 1979
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I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.
-Reinhold Niebuhr
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Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.
-Peggy Noonan
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A professional whose job it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.
-Lord Northcliffe
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I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.
-P. J. O'Rourke
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The press is like the air, a chartered libertine.
-William Pitt
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We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused -- in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery -- by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press -- their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.
-Edgar Allan Poe
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Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.
-Gerald Priestland
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Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.
-Harry Reasoner
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Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news.
-James Reston
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In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.
-Anthony Sampson
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Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
-Tom Stoppard
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If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people -- including me -- would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
-Hunter S. Thompson
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Ten years before --- even five --- I had been the same way. I wanted it all and I wanted it fast and no obstacle was big enough to put me off. Since then I have learned that some things were bigger than they looked from a distance, and now I was not so sure anymore just what I was going to get or even what I deserved.
-Hunter S. Thompson
Songs Of The Doomed - More Notes On The Death Of The American Dream (page 76)
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Books about Journalism
