“What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.”
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
“We were the ones on scene when everything went down. We weren’t better. We weren’t worse. We were just the ones standing in the blast radius.”
— Mira Grant
“You have to show reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.”
— Jorge Ramos
“Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d’avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be worthless the next? If power is like stock shares, then it follows that the immense sum thereof lately lost by B[olingbroke] has vanished like shadows in sunlight. For no matter how much wealth is lost in stock crashes, it never seems to turn up, but if power is conserved, then B’s must have gone somewhere. Where is it? Some say ‘twas scooped up by my Lord R, who hid it under a rock, lest my Lord M come from across the sea and snatch it away. My friends among the Whigs say that any power lost by a Tory is infallibly and insensibly distributed among all the people, but no matter how assiduously I search the lower rooms of the clink for B’s lost power, I cannot seem to find any there, which explodes that argument, for there are assuredly very many people in those dark salons. I propose a novel theory of power, which is inspired by . . . the engine for raising water by fire. As a mill makes flour, a loom makes cloth and a forge makes steel, so we are assured this engine shall make power. If the backers of this device speak truly, and I have no reason to deprecate their honesty, it proves that power is not a conserved quantity, for of such quantities, it is never possible to make more. The amount of power in the world, it follows, is ever increasing, and the rate of increase grows ever faster as more of these engines are built. A man who hordes power is therefore like a miser who sits on a heap of coins in a realm where the currency is being continually debased by the production of more coins than the market can bear. So that what was a great fortune, when first he raked it together, insensibly becomes a slag heap, and is found to be devoid of value. When at last he takes it to the marketplace to be spent. Thus my Lord B and his vaunted power hoard what is true of him is likely to be true of his lackeys, particularly his most base and slavish followers such as Mr. Charles White. This varmint has asserted that he owns me. He fancies that to own a man is to have power, yet he has got nothing by claiming to own me, while I who was supposed to be rendered powerless, am now writing for a Grub Street newspaper that is being perused by you, esteemed reader.”
— Neal Stephenson
“To figure out what was really happening behind the clichés, I’d learned, meant a practice of looking not at the center but at the edges of things—at the unlikeliest and weakest people, not the most apparently powerful. It meant asking lots of stupid questions, making room for inconvenient facts that didn’t fit a schema, and trying to remain honest about what I didn’t know.”
— Sara Miles
“Political pundits are under professional obligation to regard the obvious as being too obvious.”
— P.J. O’Rourke
“Khrushchev, too, looks like the kind of man his physicians must continually try to diet, and historians will some day correlate these sporadic deprivations, to which he submits “for his own good,” with his public tantrums. If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.”
— A.J. Liebling
“The primary purposes of the political pamphlets of the early 1700s were neither to enlighten nor educate the masses, but to incite partisan conversation and spread commensurate ideas . . . Facts were not permitted to fetter the views they espoused, and the restraints of objective journalistic credibility were discarded by pamphleteers bent on promoting subjective slant to an insatiable general public for whom political dissonance was an integral part of social interaction.”
— Gavin John Adams
“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.”
— John Pilger
“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”
— George Orwell
“This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view.”
— Christopher Essex
“It never occurred to me to wonder why I, a religion reporter, got the biggest story of the day, though, clearly, whatever else it was, it was a religion story. It wasn’t until about twenty years later that a friend who had been managing editor at a Gannett paper said to me: “Rob, don’t your realize you were probably the ONLY religion reporter in the whole country who got that story?” I still don’t know why I got it. Maybe they figure I was the only one in the newsroom who had any idea what a Sikh was. Or knew how to find them, let alone Hindus, in Orange Country, California”
— Paul Marshall
“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
“Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.”
— Fran Lebowitz
“You’re miserable, edgy and tired. You’re in the perfect mood for journalism.”
— Warren Ellis
“Pender laughed. “Verify? In this day and age? Who cares about verifying anything? It’s all about the speed. Who gets there first defines the truth. You know that as well as any man living.”
— David Baldacci
“In politics, the pen is at its heaviest because it is weighed down by the collective responsibility it holds towards its people and their future in the eyes of the world.”
— Aysha Taryam