Journalists Quotes

“Powerful women always interpret hostility as unrequited love.”
― Tina Brown

“I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“Ugly people kill people all the time. But when pretty people did, it got attention.”
― Chelsea Cain, Kill You Twice

“The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.
They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.”
― William Butler Yeats

“The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson II

“I would tell young journalists to be brave and go against the tide. When everyone else is relying on the internet, you should not; when nobody's walking, you should walk; when few people are reading profound books, you should read. ... rather than seeking a plusher life you should pursue some hardship. Eat simple food. When everyone's going for quick results, pursue things of lasting value. Don't follow the crowd; go in the opposite direction. If others are fast, be slow. -- Jin Yongquan”
― Judy Polumbaum, China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism

“You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“I think journalism anywhere should be based on social justice and impartiality, making contributions to society as well as taking responsibility in society. Whether you are capitalist or socialist or Marxist, journalists should have the same professional integrity. --Tan Hongkai”
― Judy Polumbaum, China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism

“They had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.”
― Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

“...nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.”
― William Butler Yeats

“I used to think the most important thing for a reporter was to be where the news is and be the first to know. Now I feel a reporter should be able to effect change. Your reporting should move people and motivate people to change the world. Maybe this is too idealistic. Young people who want to be journalists must, first, study and, second, recognize that they should never be the heroes of the story. ..A journalist must be curious, and must be humble. --Zhou Yijun”
― Judy Polumbaum, China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism

“I didn't want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for a grown man to behave.”
― Sebastian Horsley

“As touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists....”
― Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

“I think that of all the principles for journalism, the most important is to complicate simple things and simplify complicated things. At first sight, you may think something is simple, but it may conceal a great deal. However, facing a very complex thing, you should find out its essence. -Jin Yongquan”
― Judy Polumbaum, China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism

“I tried to remind myself that journalists were like tyrannosauruses. Their vision was based on movement.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“Our stable and eternal verities are being challenged. There's a kind of postmodern breakdown in journalism. The breadth of information sources and the speed of transmission are growing; but the traditional gravity of news has eroded. -Jin Yongquan ”
― Judy Polumbaum, China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism

“Media work needs ideals. Maybe thirty years from now, after I retire, I'll see the media mature and make the transition from political party, interest group, and corporate to truly public. But over the next ten years, the encroachment of commercialism and worldliness will loom much larger than the democratization we imagine. -Jin Yongquan in China Ink”
― Judy Polumbaum

“The fight for necessities - water, food, shelter, schools, hospitals, a common good. As always, he would take his tipper lorry of language and empty the horror in plain view, so no one could claim they had not known. There was nothing more to say and, of course, he would go on saying that same nothing.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Exposing filth and discovering the truth are two different things. The former is reporting, the latter is journalism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Woman Over World: The Novel

“Journalism always takes a side, whether the journalist chooses to admit it or not.

(Interview in Brasilwire)”
― Carlos Latuff

“Heartless gossips pose as professional press, they get a few quotes and run with the story like Seabiscuit to the finish line. They’re nothing more than conmen, salesmen, pitchmen, pompous men professing to be of public service—and they have the freedom to do so. There’s no price to pay.”
― pamela hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“The media, of which I am a culpable member, report, as a rule, only bad news: wars, famine, the latest Hollywood couple's implosion. I don't mean to belittle the troubles in the world, and God knows I have made a good living reporting them, but we journalists do paint a distorted picture.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“(...) Official figures focus on those who were killed in wars or civil conflict, or who were otherwise targeted. While they record the deaths of journalists in accidents while on a hazardous assignment, they do not record the deaths of journalists who die in traffic accidents because they are trying to reach a story too fast, or working past the point of exhaustion, or because they put their lives in the hands of drivers who do not know an unlit, dangerous road. They do not tell of those who survive but who are so physically and mentally scarred that they are unable to work effectively again. They do not record the impact of death and injury on other journalists who may be reluctant to probe areas that have proved fatal for their colleagues.”
― IFJ, A Survival Guide for Journalists: Live News

“News is full of noise. History is largely stripped of it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“The better print journalists allow us to consider the meaning, for ourselves and our country, of what might otherwise seem to be isolated bits of information. But while anyone can repost an article, researching and writing is hard work that requires time and money. Before you deride the "mainstream media," note that it is no longer the mainstream. It is derision that is the mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Because I work at places like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and PBS, some people see me as a stand-in for the coastal elites, for the systems they believe have been crushing them down, and I get that. When those of us in positions of power in the establishment media and the larger cultural institutions of society tell stories that don’t include you, it is disorienting and disenfranchising. It is as if you look into society’s mirror and find that you are not there. People rightly get furious when that happens.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen