Journalism Quotes

Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art

Dan Rather

A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.

Walter Lippmann

I'm an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism.

K Lee Lerner

A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times?

Bill Moyers, Channel Maker, Febr

Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.

Harry Reasoner

Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it.

Horace Greeley

The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.

Janet Malcolm

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Janet Malcolm

In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.

John Grogan

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

Oscar Wilde

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

John L'Heureux

Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.

Peggy Noonan

I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth.I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less deterministic.

Christopher Hitchens

It was when reporters became journalists and when objectivity gave way to searching for truth, that an aura of distrust and fear arose around the New Journalist.

Georgie Anne Geyer

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.

Gerald Priestland

Our job is like a baker's work -- his rolls are tasty as long as they're fresh; after two days they're stale; after a week, they're covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.

Oscar Wilde

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

Harold Evans

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

A. J. Liebling