Newspapers Quotes

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”
― Mark Twain

“Jessamine recoiled from the paper as if it were a snake." A lady does not read the newspaper. The society pages, perhaps, or the theater news. Not this filth. "
"But you are not a lady, Jessamine---," Charlotte began.
"Dear me," said Will. "Such harsh truths so early in the morning cannot be good for the digestion.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”
― William Faulkner

“I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets..”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca

“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The news isn't there to tell you what happened. It's there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear.”
― Joss Whedon, Astonishing X-Men, Vol. 2: Dangerous

“Read not the Times, read the Eternities.”
― Thoreau Henry David

“News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

“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

“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

“Newspapers are the Bibles of worldlings.
How diligently they read them!
Here they find their law and profits,
their judges and chronicles,
their epistles and revelations.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.”
― Alain de Botton

“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

“The Morning Paper

Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition
is the best
for by evening you now that you at least
have lived through another day)
and let the disasters, the unbelievable
yet approved decisions
soak in.

I don't need to name the countries,
ours among them.

What keeps us from falling down, our faces
to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'

All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:

There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!

Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.”
― Roman Payne

“I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children.”
― Mark Twain

“Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be" political "is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers—at great cost to the rest of your life.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“…the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence And Private Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Ed. By T.J. Randolph

“They put it like that?' said Glenda, wide-eyed.

'Oh, you know the sort of thing if you read the papers a lot,' said Ponder. 'I seriously think they think that it is their job to calm people down by first of all explaining why they should be overexcited and very worried.”
― Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

“Don't tell me about the Press. I know *exactly* who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they *ought* to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually *do* run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who *own* the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by *another* country. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.'

"Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?"

"Sun readers don't care *who* runs the country - as long as she's got big tits.”
― Antony Jay, Yes Prime Minister: The Diaries of the Right Hon. James Hacker

“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”
—Letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807
[Works 10:417--18]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Works of Thomas Jefferson. Including The Jefferson Bible, Autobiography and The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Illustrated), with Notes on Virginia, Parliamentary... more.

“...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....”
― New York Times

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

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence And Private Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Ed. By T.J. Randolph

“Several people toss and turn in their sleep, startled by the lines of the newspapers in their dreams, knives out, lights out, lights out, knives out!”
― H.C. Artmann, Contemporary Surrealist Prose Volume 1

“Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.”
― Finley Peter Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley