"Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality." (Thomas Griffith)"Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive." (G. K. Chesterton)
"People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life." (G.K. Chesterton)
"‘Honest journalism’-- whatever that paradox may mean." (James Agee from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men)
"The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage." (Carl Bernstein, reporter)"But what is the difference between literature and journalism?...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all." (Oscar Wilde from The Critic as Artist)
"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon." (Tom Stoppard, British playwright)
"In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat." (Harold Evans, British journalist & publisher)
"Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space." (Rebecca West)
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another." (G.K. Chesterton)
"Surely the glory of journalism is its transience." (Malcolm Muggeridge)
"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed." (Elbert Hubbard, 1856 - 1915)"A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not. (Henry Fielding, 1707 - 1754)
"Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening." (Mason Cooley)
"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists." (Norman Mailer)
"Publishing is a business, but journalism never was and is not essentially a business. Nor is it a profession." (Henry R Luce, publisher)
"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 separate, 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, British author, journalist)
"Newspapermen learn to call a murderer 'an alleged murderer' and the King of England 'the alleged King of England' to avoid libel suits." (Stephen Leacock, 1869 - 1944)"Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy." (P.J. O’Rourke)
"I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's, and in that chiefly the advertisements, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." (Thomas Jefferson)"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." (Thomas Jefferson)
