editor quotes

An editor must always be with the peoplethink with themfeel with themand he need fear nothing, he will always be rightalways be strongalways free.

-James Gordon, Snr Bennett
  In the Courier and Enquirer,12 Nov.

It often happens that a man of considerable eminence in his own profession, but without the smallest acquaintance with the fundamentals of economics, will make a suggestion which is precisely on a level with the proposition that the locomotive would be much more efficient if itsweight weretakenoffthe driving wheelsso that they could revolve more easily. The editor of an important magazineacceptswithjoy the contributionin whichhedevelopshisideas, and thepublic feebly thinks that there may be something in it, and is confirmed in this view by the fact that professional economists are as disinclined to publisha refutationof it asthe Astronomer Royal is to answer the theorists who declare that the world is flat.

- Edwin Cannan
  Wealth, ch.6.

   Trust your editor, and you'll sleep on straw.

-JohnWilliam Cheever
Favourite axiom, quoted in Susan Cheever Home Before Dark (1984).

Show me a contented newspaper editor and I will show you a bad newspaper.

- Arthur Christiansen
Headlines all my Life, ch.15.

   Editor: a person employed bya newspaper, whose business it isto separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed. Hubbard

- Elbert Green Hubbard
  The Roycroft Dictionary. 1871  Address at Framingham, Massachusetts,31 Aug. Collected in Poems and Essays (1874).

The most important single thing in publishing is the English sentence, and the editor who cannot contemplate it again and again with a sense of wonder has not yet gained respect for the complexity of learning.

-William Jovanovich
  Now, Barabbas.

Cada esta c° a‹  o da vida e   uma edi c° a‹  o, que corrige a anterior, e que sera   corrigida tambe  m, ate   a edi c° a‹  o definitiva, que o editor da   de gra c° a aos vermes. Each stage in life is an edition that supersedes the previous one and will also be superseded until the definitive edition: the one that the editor gives to the worms.

-Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Memo  rias Po  stumas de Bra  s Cubas, ch.27 (translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner,1952).

Will they ever forgive me for writing Roughing It? They know that it was thetruth, but have I not been a mark for every vulgar editor of a village journal, throughout the length and breadth of the land to hurl a stone at, and point out as the enemy to Canada.

- Susanna ne  e Strickland Moodie
  Letter to her publisher, Richard Bentley,19  Aug.

   Procrustes was an editor.

- Robin Skelton
A Devious Dictionary.

An editor is the uncrowned king of an educated democracy.

-WilliamThomas Stead
  'Government byJournalism', in the Contemporary Review, May. Collected in A Journalist onJournalism (1892).