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  • He had often noticed that six months'oblivion amounts to newspaper death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a manwants it, thanrest, profound as the grave.

    - Henry Brooks Adams
      The Education of Henry  Adams, ch.22.

  • Je ne comprends pas qu'une main pure puisse toucher un journal sans une convulsion de de  go u" t. I cannot imagine how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without disgust.

    - Charles Baudelaire
      Mon coeur mis a'   nu, pt.81.

  • What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books have had their daythe theatres have had their daythe temple of religion has had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all these in the great movements of human thought and of human civilisation. A newspaper can send more souls to Heaven, and save more from Hell, than all the churches or chapels in New Yorkbesides making money at the same time.

    -James Gordon, Snr Bennett
      In the NewYork Herald,19  Aug.

  • Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.

    - Malcolm Stanley Bradbury
      Stepping Westward, bk.1, ch.1.

  • Never forget that if you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.

    - Arthur Brisbane
    c.1900  Quoted in Oliver Carlson Brisbane: a Candid Biography (1937), ch.5.

  • The people who lived behind those clean lace curtains in row after row of identical boxes were newspaper readers, and every word in at any rate my newspaper must be clear and comprehensible to them, must be interesting to them, must encourage them to break away from littleness, stimulate their ambition, help them to want to build a better land.

    - Arthur Christiansen
    Headlines all my Life, ch.1.

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

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

  • The invariable law of the newspaper is to be interesting.

    - Charles Anderson Dana
     The Art of Newspaper Making,'The Making of a Newspaper Man'.

  •    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).

  • To us, who are regaled every morning and evening with intelligence, and are supplied from day to day with materials for conversation, it is difficult to conceive how man can subsist without a newspaper.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      In The Idler, no.7, 27 May.

  •    Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink.

    - Karl Kraus
    Aphorism collected in Heinrich Fischer (ed) Beim Wort genommen (1955). Translated by Harry Zohn in Half-truths and one-and-a-half truths (1986).

  • The news of the dayas it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper isinall literalnessthebibleofdemocracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

    -Walter Lippmann
      Liberty and the News,'What Modern Liberty Means'.

  • Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

    - Norman Kingsley Mailer
      In Esquire,  Jun.

  • The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

    - Don(ald Robert Perry) Marquis
    Quoted in E  Anthony O Rare Don Marquis (1962), ch.11.

  •    A good newspaper,I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

    - Arthur Miller
     In the Observer, 26 Nov.

  • While the journalist exists merelyas the publicity agent of big business, a large circulation, got by fair means or foul, is a newspaper's one and onlyaim.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      In G.K.'s Weekly, 29 Dec.

  •    What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.

    -Joseph Pulitzer
    c.1910  Quoted in Alleyne Ireland An Adventure with a Genius, ch.4.

  • Thenewspaper is of necessitysomethingof a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of a monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of News. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of Truth suffer wrong.Comment is free, but facts are sacred.

    - C(harles) P(restwich) Scott
      Of the newspaper industry. In the Manchester Guardian, special centenary issue, 6 May.

  • One of the virtues, perhaps almost the chief virtue, of a newspaper is its independence.Whatever its position or character, at least it should have a soul of its own.

    - C(harles) P(restwich) Scott
    In the Manchester Guardian, special centenary issue,6 May.

  • Le journal repre  sente l'association; l'on peut dire qu'il parle a'   chacun de ses lecteurs au nom de tous les autres, et il les entra|"ne d'autant plus aise  ment qu'ils sont individuellement plus faibles. L'empire des journaux doit donc cro|"tre a'   mesure que les hommes s'e  galisent. A newspaper represents an association; one might say that it addresses each of its readers in the name of all the others, and influences them in proportion to their individual weakness. The power of newspapers should therefore increase as men become more equal.

    - Alexis Charles Henri Cle  rel de Tocqueville
    ^40  De la De  mocratie en Ame  rique (Democracy in America), vol.2, pt.2, ch.6.

  • Il n'y a qu'un journal qui puisse venir de  poser au me"  me moment dans mille esprits la me"  me pense  e. Only a newspaper can place at the same time in a thousand minds the same thought.

    - Alexis Charles Henri Cle  rel de Tocqueville
    ^40  De la De  mocratie en Ame  rique (Democracy in America), vol.2, pt.2, ch.6.

  • Un journal est un conseiller qu'on n'a pas besoin d'aller chercher, mais qui se pre  sente de lui-me"  me et qui vous parle tous les jours et brie'  vement de l'affaire commune, sans vous de  ranger de vos affaires particulie'  res. A newspaper is an adviser whom one does not need to seek out, but one who comes of his own accord and speaks to you every day, briefly, of public affairs, without disturbing you from your own.

    - Alexis Charles Henri Cle  rel de Tocqueville
    ^40  De la De  mocratie en Ame  rique (Democracy in America), vol.2, pt.2, ch.6.

  • I have at last come to a momentous decision. I am going to give up my press-clippings agency. I find that even a Wolf favourablenoticemakesmefeelsick nowadays,whilean unfavourable one, even from a small provincial newspaper, puts me off my work for days.

    -Plum
      Letter to Denis Mackail,15 Oct.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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