Great Journalists Quotes

“The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.”

— David Halberstam

“I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.
They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.”

— W.B. Yeats

“I am incredibly proud of the many journalists I have worked with throughout my career and the great campaigns that we have fought and won.”

— Rebekah Brooks

“There have always been Southern whites who, at great risk, pioneered in the movement for racial justice. I was lucky to know some of them: Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee; Carl and Anne Braden, editors of the Southern Courier in Louisville, Kentucky; Pat Watters and Margaret Long, journalists with the Atlanta Constitution; reporters Fred Powledge and Jack Nelson.”

— Howard Zinn

“The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.”

— Lee Gutkind

“General Sherman looked upon journalists as a nuisance and a danger at headquarters and in the field, and acted toward them accordingly, then as throughout his great war career.”

— Henry Villard

“Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's "Ulysses"; Kafka's "Transformation"; Bely's "St. Petersburg," and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, "In Search of Lost Time.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase 'great power'. What would it mean, I'd asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried technocrats and so on if India achieved 'great power status'? What were the images evoked by this tag?
Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, this aspiration took on, for the first time, the contours of an imagined reality. This is what the nuclearists wanted: to sign treaties, to be pictured with the world's powerful, to hang portraits on their walls, to become ancestors. On the bomb they had pinned their hopes of bringing it all back.”

— Amitav Ghosh

“Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.”

— Jane Leavy

“The truth is, I don't have any problem with journalists - I count some of them as friends - also some of my heroes are journalists, I'm a big fan of Robert Fisk - great people or crazy people who are prepared to stand up for what's right.”

— Daniel Craig

“Journalists don't have audiences - they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.”

— Howard Rheingold

“From the late David Broder on down, the most powerful and influential of the great Washington columnists and journalists tend to cultivate the driest, least lively voices possible.”

— Alex Pareene

“I am not one of the great journalists of my time.”

— Jane Pauley

“The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.”

— Salman Rushdie

“With legitimate journalists I've always had a great time - I've never gone out of my way to court the press. That's probably cost me some money, but I've always had the respect of my peers.”

— Val Kilmer

“It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that outsiders would not so easily guess.”

— Max Weber

“I am really inspired by writers, and weirdly - respect music journalists, which I think makes me the exception amongst most musicians. I think it's a craft. I think it's been really neglected - sadly. I think about the days of the great legendary rock critics. Who's going to become that when magazines and newspapers don't pay anyone properly or don't seem to respect the history or research that is required?”

— Emily Haines

“The American elite ... is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush
sophistry washed down with Chardonnay.”

— Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

“Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado? Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.”

— Marie Colvin

“He has been named as the heir apparent of the great Argentine hero, Diego Maradona, by journalists, players, and Maradona himself, alike. I'd personally put him in a drawer of my bedside table.”

— Franz Beckenbauer

“One of the great weaknesses of journalists is they interview people and they think that's important. They think that they are going to show them their true hand. But more to the point, they're trapped.”

— George Friedman

“We don't have the Democrats doing a Fox News debate. They have decided they want to boycott Fox News, at least this election cycle. I don't see Hillary [Clinton] and Bernie Sanders doing a Fox News debate.And they should. We have great journalists on this network. I'm an opinion person. It wouldn't be me - that I think would do a great job. But if they're not going to put themselves in an environment like this, do you have to now reconsider, in other words, going forward, that maybe these liberal networks don't deserve the access to these candidates?”

— Sean Hannity

“Most of life is hell. It's filed with failure and loss. People disappoint you. Dreams don't work out. Hearts get broken. Innocent journalists die. And the best moments of life, when everything comes together, are few and fleeting. But you'll never get to the next great moment if you don't keep going. So that's what I do. I keep going.”

— Sigourney Weaver

“[On journalists:] ... however lyingly libellous they may be: nobody can seriously hurt the reputation of a Great person. If he is hurt: he is not Great. They can but scratch at his skin with their mice nails.”

— Caitlin Thomas

“I have so much more compassion for journalists and the work that they have to do, in order to do the jobs that they have to do. I am much more in awe of and am celebratory of great journalism when I see it, and I'm much more critical of bad journalism, or crap masquerading as journalism.”

— Thomas Sadoski

“When I was a young reporter, the great vice among journalists was whiskey. Today, it's cynicism.”

— Paul Simon

“We don't stand here alone, it's possible through the great organisations that support us. The disclosures that Edward Snowden revealed aren't only a threat to privacy but to democracy, when the most important decisions made affect all of us. Thank you to Edward Snowden. I share this with Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who are exposing truth.”

— Laura Poitras

“If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

“The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.”

— Alexis De Tocqueville

“There are great, obviously really, really wonderful and important journalists out there. And it is a very important thing to be and do, if not the most important 'cause how you interpret a story can then make the difference. So it is a very powerful thing to be. And when misused, it's very sad.”

— Angelina Jolie

“[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

“Moving forward, investigative journalists need to train themselves to be media amphibians - just as comfortable with the classic verities of great journalism as they are with video, Twitter, Facebook, and, most importantly, citizen journalism.”

— Arianna Huffington

“There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.”

— Auguste Rodin

“As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, DC as the "capital of the free world." But it seems to me that this great city (Brussels), which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title.”

— Joe Biden

“No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.”

— Peggy Noonan

“Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.”

— William C. Brown

“Today, former President Bill Clinton met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and convinced him to release two American journalists that have been jailed since March. Isn't that great? This is big, yeah. Or as Clinton calls it, another Asian happy ending.”

— Conan O'Brien