quotations about newspapers
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
A newspaper, like a theatre, must mainly owe its continuance in life to the fact that it pleases many persons; and in order to please many persons it will, unconsciously perhaps, respond to their several tastes, reflect their various qualities, and reproduce their views. In a certain sense it is evolved out of the community that absorbs it, and, therefore, partaking of the character of the community, while it may retain many merits and virtues, it will display itself, as in some respects ignorant, trivial, narrow, and vulgar.
WILLIAM WINTER
The Press and the Stage
When woman has a newspaper which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely write her own thoughts.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
remarks to the Woman's Auxiliary Congress of the Public Press Congress, May 23, 1893
The careful reader of a few good newspapers can learn more in a year than most scholars do in their great libraries.
F. B. SANBORN
attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.
H. L. MENCKEN
attributed, Insults: A Practical Anthology of Scathing Remarks and Acid Portraits
I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light--instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
Even the correspondent of a newspaper has occasional scruples.
J. RUSSELL YOUNG
attributed, Day's Collacon
A lady does not read the newspaper. The society pages, perhaps, or the theater news. Not this filth.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
We expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
speech at Bloomington, May 29, 1856
Only a newspaper! Quick read, quick lost, Who sums the treasure that it carries hence? Torn, trampled under feet, who counts thy cost, Star-eyed intelligence?
MARY CLEMMER AMES
The Journalist
A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"The Plan For an All-Russia Political Newspaper", What Is To Be Done?
Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary source for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves.
ROBERT DARNTON
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
The way to prevent irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787
Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
Have you noticed that life, real honest to goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
JEAN ANOUILH
attributed, News Culture
Printer's ink is the great apostle of progress, whose pulpit is the press.
HORACE GREELEY
attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
Carried down my last number to the Advocate. They will not publish the letters I wish. So much for the freedom of that press.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
diary, February 13, 1837