John Gunther Quotes

What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.

— John Gunther

“All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.”

— John Gunther

“Live while you live, then die and be done with.”

— John Gunther

“Yemen produces coffee, Egypt cotton, Iraq dates, Palestine oranges, and Syria trouble.”

— John Gunther

“Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.”

— John Gunther

“If a man's from Texas, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him by asking?”

— John Gunther

“One travels like a golf ball, hopping from green to green.”

— John Gunther

“The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second, is to find out who will tell you.”

— John Gunther

“There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.”

— John Gunther

“What interested me was not news, but appraisal. What I sought was to grasp the flavor of a man, his texture, his impact, what he stood for, what he believed in, what made him what he was and what color he gave to the fabric of his time.”

— John Gunther

“The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.”

— John Gunther

“Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.”

— John Gunther

It's the equivalent of putting on the brakes suddenly while driving uphill.

— John Gunther

“The camera is one of the greatest liars of our time.”

— John Gunther

“Touch water in the West and you touch everything.”

— John Gunther

“France is the most civilized country in the world and doesn't care who knows it.”

— John Gunther

“[Chicago] is the greatest and most typically American of all cities. New York is bigger and more spectacular and can outmatch it in other superlatives, but it is a "world" city, more European in some respects than American.”

— John Gunther

“Moscow is the city where if Marilyn Monroe should walk down the street with nothing on but shoes, people would stare at her feet first.”

— John Gunther

“Arkansas is a curious and interesting community ... it is probably the most untouched and unawakened of all American states.”

— John Gunther

“He was trying to save both his faces.”

— John Gunther

New York city, the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean Paradox, the inferno with no-out-of bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States. It meets the most severe test that may be applied to definition of a metropolis - it stays up all night. But also it becomes a small town when it rains.

— John Gunther

God is what's good in me.

— John Gunther

“I have so much to do! And there's so little time!”

— John Gunther

“Old and new kiss everywhere in Africa”

— John Gunther