Quotations
Writing
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, April 24, 2006
Dueling masters on words:
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
--William Faulkner, writer (1897-1962), on Ernest Hemingway, writer (1899-1961)
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
--Ernest Hemingway, writer (1899-1961), on William Faulkner, writer (1897-1962)
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Friday, Feb. 10, 2006
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all
happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and
how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
--Ernest Hemingway, a writer even by his own definition, 1934
"George Orwell wrote that the English language 'becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.' In taking care with language, we take care of ourselves."
--Bret Stephens, editor, the Jerusalem Post, in Wall Street Journal, 6/23/04
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006
I don't need time. What I need is a deadline. --Duke Ellington was a jazz pianist, composer, and conductor who live from 1899 to 1974.
"And above all, never forget that the pen is mightier than the plow-share. By this I mean that writing, all in all, is a hell of a lot more fun than farming. For one thing, writers seldom, if ever, have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and shovel manure. As far as I am concerned, that gives them the edge right there."
--Willa Cather, Pulitzer Prize-writer, 1873-1947
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an American novelist whose books include The House of Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter.
Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light. -- Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) was editor and publisher of the New York World and one of the great men of journalism of the 19th century.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. -- Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was a novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. His novels include Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924).
Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. -- Mark Twain
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. --Anonymous. This quotation is often attributed to Mark Twain (it sounds very Twain-like), but there is no evidence that he said it.
"Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead."
-- Ann-Marie MacDonald, author, The Way the Crow Flies, 2003
Newspapers and newspapering
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Thursday, May 4, 2006
On formative journalistic temptations:
"At Ursuline Academy, Sister Immaculata, my geometry teacher, saw me as a hopeless idler. I can't blame her. I was a terrible math student. She was particularly dismayed to catch me reading a copy of Mary McCarthy's Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, which I thought I had cleverly inserted
inside my geometry text so I could tune into the escapades of all her evil relations while my teacher nattered on about how to measure angles.
. . . She leaned close, and put her head close to mine. Her lightweight rimless glasses slid down her nose. She smelled like talc and sanctity. She
hissed: 'I hope you don't grow up to be like her, to be someone spiteful, someone who'--dramatic pause--'likes to spill the beans.' Of course, when you get an order that explicit and that stifling at a formative age, it's only a matter of time before you decide to do just theopposite."
--Madeleine Blais, journalist, author, educator and Pulitzer winner, 2003
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, April 3, 2006
"[T]he newspaper, especially when it is of the popular sort, offers us a part of experience that we writers cannot afford to miss. It is raw material straight from the knacker's yard, and we are stupid if we turn up our noses because it smells of blood and sweat...."
--W. Somerset Maughan, author, The Summing Up (1938)
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006
Ode to a city editor:
"His memory was remarkable. He had the gift of knowing instantly the right word. His deft touches lifted stories out of the ordinary. He never hesitated; when he wrote a headline it was a Sun masterpiece. He handled the living language and was not afraid to use a word or a phrase merely because it was unusual. His pencil slew a million clichés."
--Stanley Walker, newspaperman, remembering Selah Merrill "Boss" Clarke (1881-1912), night city editor, The Baltimore Sun, 1934
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, Feb. 27, 2006
"[I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement."
--Anna Quindlen, columnist and author, "Loud and Clear" (2204)
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, March 6, 2006
"Neutrality in journalism means refusal to take sides. Many newspapers are neutral with regard to certain issues. Hardly a newspaper exists which
is completely neutral upon all issues. Such a newspaper would be regarded as spineless. Just as the individual cannot escape taking sides against
evils in life, so the newspaper necessarily has convictions against crime, corruption, and other evils in public affairs."
--George Fox Mott, journalism professor, in "An Outline Survey of Journalism," 1940
"[Edna's] idea of a successful lead is one that might cause a reader who is having breakfast with his wife to 'spit out his coffee, clutch his chest, and say, "My God, Martha! Did you read this!"' When Edna went to Fort Lauderdale not long ago to talk about police reporting with some of the young reporters in the Herald's Broward County bureau, she said, 'For sanity and survival, there are three cardinal rules in the newsroom: Never trust an editor, never trust an editor, and never trust an editor.'"
--Calvin Trillin's profile of legendary Miami Herald cops reporter Edna Buchanan, The New Yorker, 1986
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, Jan. 23, 2006
Variations on "truthiness":
"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
-- Mark Twain, author, newspaperman and humorist (1835-1910)
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Friday, Jan. 20, 2006
"And let us all be thankful for the newspaper, a truly useful object. The press is the watchdog of a free society, and while TV reporters are styling their hair and practicing winsome facial expressions, newspaper reporters are on the phone, knocking on doors, doing the work, holding power accountable. And you read their work and absorb something from it, or not, and then you spread the newspaper out on the floor and it absorbs paint drips, or you pack it in a box around fragile objects, or you roll it up and swat cockroaches, or stuff it into cracks to keep the wind out, or stuff it under the kindling and light the fire -- one simple thing with six distinct uses. Or you can recycle it and it will transcend into cardboard. You can't do that with images on a screen."
--Garrison Keillor, humorist and writer, 2005
(Thanks to alert WORDster Brad Knickerbocker)
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, Dec. 5, 2005
"A newspaper is like a church. It is built by ordinary sinners, who in their individual lives are often petty and corrupt, but who collectively create an institution that transcends themselves."
--Philip Ignatius, author and journalist, quoted in The Press, Geneva
Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamison, eds., 2005
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, Sept. 12, 2005
"This pen moved the more readily on the page whenever it explored my quicksilver days as a newspaperman east or west, or in between. The newspaper was my first love, and, come to think of it, my last. I smelled the ink of the press room when I was a printer's devil, and have found no other scent as stimulating except in the heart of a blue-spruce grove, or occasionally in that of a lady."
--Gene Fowler, newspaperman, 1961
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, Sept. 19, 2005
"When professionals help create the conditions that promote public deliberation, they contribute to the formation of public knowledge. Journalists can do this by naming and framing issues so that citizens see all of their options for acting on a problem and not just the bipolar extremes often generated by partisan debate."
--David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, citing
essay by journalist and educator Cole C. Campbell, 2005.
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005
"One of the chief difficulties in journalism now is to keep the news instinct from running rampant over the restraints of accuracy and conscience."
--Joseph Pulitzer, newspaper publisher, 1904
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005
"There is one sacred rule of journalism. The writer must not invent. The legend on the [journalist's] license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP."
-- John Hersey (1914-1993), writer and author of Hiroshima (1946).
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005
News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.
Lord Northcliffe
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters." --Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959) (Thanks to alert WORDster Jim Doyle) TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM
I thank God we have no free schools or printing, and I hope that we shall not have these for a hundred years. For learning has brought disobediences and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both. --Sir William Berkeley was governor of the colony of Virginia from 1642 to 1652 and 1660 until his death in 1677.
“For one reason or another there has gathered about the newspaperman’s job an atmosphere of mystery or romance, a sort of glamour that has an unfailing appeal for youth on the quest for a vocation.” -- George Fox Mott was a writer and educator in the first half of the 20th century.
Nobody with a living brain cell goes into the newspaper business for the money. They're in it because digging up the truth is interesting and consequential work, and for sheer entertainment it beats the hell out of humping products for GE or Microsoft. Done well, journalism brings to light chicanery, oppression and injustice, though such concerns seldom weigh heavily on those who own newspapers. -- Carl Hiassen is a reporter and columnist for the Miami Herald. He is also a novelist, and his books include Tourist Season and Double Whammy.
"I think that American newspapers have taken a very serious wrong turn, and that aside from a few newspapers the quality of the product is in decline, especially for the reader, and I think that newspapers have forgotten that their readers are readers and love writing -- writing is what people want. They don't want a sort of concept of journalism; they want writers. And writers are always individuals.
"This is what people turn to newspapers for. They don't turn to newspapers for advice and for personal service and for sort of glossy pieces about lifestyle and home decor and cooking and how to bring up your children. They're really looking to newspapers for the same thing that people looked to newspapers for back before television -- television didn't change anything and USA Today didn't really change anything."
--Garrison Keillor, writer and radio host, 2005 (From Today's Word on Journalism; thanks to alert WORDster Bruce Adomeit)
To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression. -- James Madison
Freedom of speech and thought
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Social Discourse in the Body Politik:
"Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend."
--Samuel Johnson, writer and thinker (how come we don't use that title much anymore?), 1709-1784.
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
-- H.L. Mencken
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006
"Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
--Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)
"There is nothing in the world more powerful than an idea. No weapon
can destroy it; no power can conquer it, except the power of another
idea."
--Albert Einstein, physicist, 1879-1955
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005
"Are media liberal? Maybe media were liberal in some ways in the days of family newspaper ownership in some places. Not anymore. These are big media conglomerates, for the most part. Primarily, they care about performance and returns, not about politics. Abandon the illusion that there's a socialist behind the curtain manipulating the media levers. That clanking sound is just a cash register."
--Charlie Madigan, columnist, Chicago Tribune, 2005
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005
"The times demand a renaissance in freedom of thought and freedom of expression, a renaissance that will end the orthodoxy that threatens to devitalize us."
--William O. Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, 1952
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005
"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. To the sacrifice of time, labor, fortune, a public servant must count upon adding that of peace of mind and even reputation. . . . It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nations of its benefits than is done by such abandoned prostitution to falsehood."
--Thomas Jefferson, 3rd U.S. president (1743-1826)
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Friday, Sept. 16, 2005
Chilling Effect:
"Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen."
--George Orwell, writing for The Freedom Defence Committee in the Socialist Leader, Sept. 18, 1948 (From TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Monday, April 4, 2005: Thanks to alert WORDster Herb Strentz)
"There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes, and the other is the Bill of Rights."
--Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, U.S. Marine Corps, 1930
Policing the marketplace of ideas:
"The political class is not sliding reluctantly down a slippery slope, it is eagerly skiing down it, extending its regulation of political speech in order to make its life less stressful and more secure."
--George F. Will, columnist, 1997
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM--Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2006
"Anyone who acts as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confesses a doctrine that is alien to America."
--President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
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