Media Quotes

Power without responsibility -- the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

Stanley Baldwin

I almost wish I could be more exciting, that I could match what is happening out there to me.

Whitney Houston

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

C. Wright Mills

It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

James Fenimore Cooper

If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.

William A. Orton

The men with the muck-rake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.

Theodore Roosevelt

I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

Barbara Walters

There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Of all the dramatic media, radio is the most visual.

John Reeves

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control -- indoctrination, we might say -- exercised through the mass media.

Noam Chomsky

Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.

Maureen Dowd

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.

Oswald Spengler

The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.

John Berger

The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.

William Cobbett

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

Oscar Wilde

It's like a play we're watching

James Dye

How would your life be different if...You were conscious about the food you ate, the people you surround yourself with, and the media you watch, listen to, or read? Let today be the day...You pay attention to what you feed your mind, your body, and your life. Create a nourishing environment conducive to your growth and well-being today.

Steve Maraboli

That ephemeral sheet,... the newspaper, is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

Edmond de Goncourt, Journal, Jul

The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.

Johann von Goethe

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

Samuel Butler