Best Journalists Quotes

#1. Some of our best journalists take themselves even more seriously than the politicians they write about.

R. W. Apple Jr.

#2. 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

#3. Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a 'news junkie.' This scrappy memoir ... might become required reading for aspiring journalists.

Publishers Weekly

#4. My experience with journalists authorize me to record that a very large number of them are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest, and inadequately supervised.... They have huge power, and many of them are extremely reckless.

Conrad Black

#5. We've never had a situation where mass media has been so censored, at least in my lifetime. When I was younger, networks like NBC, CBS, were independently owned, and took their jobs as journalists seriously. There used to be documentaries like "The Selling of the Pentagon."

Jello Biafra

#6. The dedication of Don Winslow's novel 'The Cartel' is nearly two pages long: a list of journalists who were either murdered or 'disappeared' in Mexico between 2004 and 2012 - the period covered in this hugely hypnotic new thriller.

Alan Cheuse

#7. Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming. They have a responsibility not to report what these scientists say.

Ross Gelbspan

#8. My belief is that 'recluse' is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters ...

Thomas Pynchon

#9. Journalists say my music is "blue wave," or "dreamy," or "jangly-slacker jewel," and none of it really makes sense to me.

Mac DeMarco

#10. Most people are not shocked that I am occasionally rude to journalists. They are probably amazed I don't punch one in the face.

Ken Livingstone

#11. In a film muddied by fictional detail, the new Spielberg production 'Fifth Estate's portrayal of the 'Guardian's work with Wikileaks is accurate in describing the running dispute between journalists who wanted to redact documents to make them safe and Julian Assange, who wanted no such restraint.

Nick Davies

#12. I can think of few things more painful than naming four good things about yourself in front of a room of journalists!

Anne Hathaway

#13. We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat.

Jim Lehrer

#14. I'm a member of the working press; you'd think I'd know better than to listen to journalists.

P. J. O'Rourke

#15. It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.

Glenn Greenwald

#16. 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

#17. I think if there's some kind of crisis in news journalism ... a crisis of credibility, then it's been created by journalists. I'm empathetic, I understand it and I see it, but I'm not sympathetic about it. If you want people to think of journalism with higher regard then do better work.

Russell Crowe

#18. We will certainly see teachers, journalists, artists and poets in space. Whatever it takes to the be the best is what it will take to get you into space.

Eugene Cernan

#19. Today, as young French and Dutch Muslims wander through Upper Manhattan and Chicago's South Side, it's not uncommon to see European politicians, journalists, and activists in those same urban areas, visiting mosques and community centers trying to identify "best practices" they can take back home.

Hisham D. Aidi

#20. Journalists often ask me: "Aren't you sorry that after all the work you've done, you're best known as Magneto and Gandalf?" But that's what I've always wanted - not to be known as myself. I want to draw attention to the characters.

Ian McKellen

#21. There are some times when sports rises to the level of news and when sports broadcasters acquit themselves as well as the best news broadcasters do, they aren't there to dramatize. They're there as journalists.

Bob Costas

#22. History is written by victors and, occasionally, sensationalist journalists. I mean that with the best respect.

Ray Stevenson

#23. The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

Russell Baker

#24. The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the "best" sources.

Walter Karp

#25. 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

#26. So much of what I say gets sensationalized and journalists have to report on scandal because that's what people are hungry to read about.

Megan Fox

#27. There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.

Michael Anti

#28. It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.

Mal Peet

#29. Music journalists are some of the lazy, most uninspired, dull people I've ever met.

Zachary Cole Smith

#30. Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

Arnold Bennett

#31. I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

P. J. O'Rourke

#32. No, there are no hard and fast rules about sources, no printed booklet to help journalists through.

Ian Hislop

#33. There is unspeakable yet entirely preventable suffering in this world. The job of journalists and writers engaged with global issues is to articulate the unspeakable and give voice to solutions.
K. Lee Lerner

K. Lee Lerner

#34. I'm sort of planting Post-It notes all over my psyche. Do not skateboard wasted. Do not buy $10,000 rugs. Be careful what you say to journalists. You don't have to stay up until 7 A.M. - tomorrow is a new day.

Ryan Adams

#35. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.

P. J. O'Rourke

#36. Journalists should be watchdogs, not lapdogs.

Newton Lee

#37. Most political journalists come to Washington because they're snappy writers, big thinkers, or news breakers. Me? My ticket to the big leagues had little to do with talent. It was mostly about the governor I was covering, Bill Clinton.

Ron Fournier

#38. I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.

Charles De Lint

#39. I've had journalists beg me to please say something negative about my estate.

Freema Agyeman

#40. 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

#41. In so many countries, Western journalists are viewed simply as dollar signs. We're ransom objects.

Lynsey Addario

#42. You know it's easy here to buy journalists.

Emile Lahoud

#43. I think as journalists, we have to keep our distance from power.

Jorge Ramos

#44. I think it's my interaction with journalists that has pegged me more as political than my actual records, although they have obviously political aspects to them as well.

Serj Tankian

#45. For some people it's real therapy to talk to journalists about their private lives and inner thoughts. But I would rather keep something to myself.

Mick Jagger

#46. Journalists are quite surprised outside their dinner parties when they hear where I live. 'Van Nuys? You still live there?' It is like saying you're from Alabama.

Sandra Tsing Loh