A.J. Liebling Quotes

#1. It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum.

A.J. Liebling

#2. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.

A.J. Liebling

#3. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.

A.J. Liebling

#4. People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

A.J. Liebling

#5. Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.

A.J. Liebling

#6. A Louisiana politician can't afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department.

A.J. Liebling

#7. An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.

A.J. Liebling

#8. Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

A.J. Liebling

#9. There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

A.J. Liebling

#10. It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.

A.J. Liebling

#11. If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it.

A.J. Liebling

#12. He felt a giant among pygmies, a pike among crappies, as he stood there among the legislators, most of whom owed him for flavors - special bills passed for their law clients, state jobs for constituents, " contributions" for their personal campaign funds, and so on.

A.J. Liebling

#13. I used to be shy about ordering a steak after I had eaten a steak sandwich, but I got used to it.

A.J. Liebling

#14. I met a keen observer who gave me a tip: 'If you run across a restaurant where you often see priests eating with priests, or sporting girls with sporting girls, you may be confident that it is good. Those are two classes of people who like to eat well and get their money's worth.'

A.J. Liebling

#15. I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy.

A.J. Liebling

#16. Up there in my retreat, I feel the city calling to me. It winks at me with its myriad eyes, and I go out and get stiff as a board. I seek out companionship, and if I do not find friends, I make them. A wonderful, grand old Babylon.

A.J. Liebling

#17. Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

A.J. Liebling

#18. If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.

A.J. Liebling

#19. The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

A.J. Liebling

#20. The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.

A.J. Liebling

#21. In the youth of middle age
square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile
...

A.J. Liebling

#22. If a boxer ever went as crazy as Nijinsky all the wowsers in the world would be screaming 'punch-drunk.' Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn't there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs

A.J. Liebling

#23. Boxing has always been a primarily urban pastime (whereas the defining suburban sport is auto-racing, in which the machine and its anonymous mechanics hold far greater importance than the driver). When white Americans left the cities, they left boxing as well.

A.J. Liebling

#24. The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

A.J. Liebling

#25. Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

A.J. Liebling

#26. The fighter (like the writer) must stand alone. If he loses he cannot call an executive conference and throw off on a vice president or the assistant sales manager. He is consequently resented by fractional characters who cannot live outside an organization.

A.J. Liebling

#27. I can write better than anyone who can write faster,

A.J. Liebling

#28. The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.

A.J. Liebling

#29. The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.

A.J. Liebling

#30. I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and i can write faster than anybody who can write better.

A.J. Liebling

#31. Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

A.J. Liebling

#32. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

A.J. Liebling

#33. The sight of a pretty woman had an airborne chemical effect, like nerve gas. It relaxed the rubber band around his wallet.

A.J. Liebling

#34. Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.

A.J. Liebling

#35. If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.

A.J. Liebling

#36. A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

A.J. Liebling

#37. The way to write is well, and how is your own business.

A.J. Liebling

#38. No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.

A.J. Liebling