"Journalism is literature in a hurry." Matthew Arnold

"Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive." G.K. Chesterton

"A newswriter is a man without virtue, who lies at home for his own profit." Samuel Johnson

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please." Mark Twain

"Writing good editorials is chiefly telling the people what they think, not what you think." Arthur Brisbane

"I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets." Napoleon

"There are no dull subjects--there are only dull writers." H.L. Mencken

"As long as I am in this office, the press will never irritate me, never affect me." Richard Nixon (March 30, 1971)

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Thomas Jefferson (1786)

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Thomas Jefferson (1787)

"To the press alone, checquered 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." Thomas Jefferson (1799)

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . 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 falsehood and errors." Thomas Jefferson (1807)

"The press has no better friend than I am, no one who is more ready to acknowledge . . . its tremendous power for both good and evil." Abraham Lincoln

"When I read what the lousy press of the days of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson had to say about those men, I'm comforted, for I've had it easy by comparison. . . . To hell with [the press]. When history is written they will be the sons-of-bitches, not I. Look at old Medill, Horace Greeley et al. in Lincoln's time, Biddle in Jackson's and old man Pulitzer in Cleveland's. It isn't Jackson, Lincoln, and Cleveland who were wrong!" Harry S. Truman

Asked awhat he thought of the press at a spring, 1962 news conference, JFK said, "Well, I am reading it more and enjoying it less, and so on, but I have not complained nor do I plan to make any general complaints. I read and talk to myself about it, but I don't plan to issue any general statement on the press. I think that they are doing their task, as a critical branch, the fourth estate. And I am attempting to do mine. And we are going to live together for a period, and then go our separate ways." John F. Kennedy

"Always remember that [the press's] interests and ours ultimately conflict." John F. Kennedy (to his speech writer, Theodore Sorenson)

"The greatest con game in the world was done by Kennedy so that many people thought that he just loved the press. I knew Jack Kennedy very well, and I know he hated the press. It's very normal for a president to have that attitude." Harrison Salisbury, NY Times correspondent

"Journalism kills you, but it keeps you alive as long as you're doing it." Horace Greeley

"If ever the public was betrayed by its press, it's ours." William Dean Howells

"In America the press rules the countrty; it rules its politics, its religion, its social practices." E. W. Scripps

"The press of this countrty is now and always has been so thoroughly dominated by the wealthy few of the country that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the people the correct information concerning political, economical, and social subjects which it is necessary that the mass of people shall have, in order that they shall vote and in all ways act in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force and chicanery of the ruling and employing class." E. W. Scripps

"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." Marshall McLuhan

"Real news is bad news." Marshall McLuhan

"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world. . . . The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers." Soren Kierkegaard

"Journalism is not a profession, but a mission." Benito Mussolini

"Journalists should be people in whom there is at least a flicker of hope." Sen. Paul Simon

"Journalists are the midwives of history." James Plath

"It is a newspaper's duty to print the news, and raise hell." Wilbur F. Storey, editor, Chicago Times (1861)

"Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it--a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures." Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

"Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space." Rebecca West

"When you catch an adjective, kill it." Mark Twain

"Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried." John Updike

"The news is not if a dog bites a man. If a man bites a dog, that is news." John Bogart

"Every newspaper editor pays tribute to the devil." La Fontaine

"If a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when The New York Times prints it, it's a sociological study." Adolph S. Ochs

"Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff." Adlai Stevenson

"News is the first rough draft of history." Ben Bradlee

"A newspaper is the lowest thing there is!" Mayor Richard J. Daley

"The press was to serve the governed, not the governors." Justice Hugo L. Black

"Myths are for churchgoers, not reporters." Sherman Duffy

"The American press is . . . kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man." Theodore Dreiser

". . . whatever the divine Providence permitted to occur, I was not too proud to report." the last New York Sun editorial

"A reporter is no better than his source of information." Justice William O. Douglas

"In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the Press, like the church, counted its martyrs by the thousands." James A. Garfield

"The first casualty when war comes is truth." Sen. Hiram Johnson (1917)

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper . . ." George Orwell

"All journalism is subjective . . . fairness, not some unattainable notion of 'objectivity,' is the reporter's obligation." Carl Bernstein

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." Rudyard Kipling

"King over all the children of pride Is the Press--The Press--The Press!" Rudyard Kipling

"The gallery in which the reporters sit has become the Fourth Estate of the realm." Thomas Babington Macaulay

"The essence of the free press is the reliable, reasonable and moral nature of freedom." Karl Marx

"There is no such thing as an independent press in America." John Swinton, editor, New York Sun

"The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe . . ." Thorstein Veblen

"As a journalist, I am a fact-finder, a gate-keeper, a story-teller. Most of all, I am a truth seeker. As a journalist, I am most decidedly not a cynic. Far from it. Instead, I am a romantic, for I believe--viscerally as well as cerebrally--that all I have to do is tell my stories, deliver the facts, and if I do that well and often, then the citizens of a democracy will do the right thing. Teaching, it seems to me, is about the only other institution in our society that shows as much faith in the people." Paul McMasters (Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, 1996)