Top 100 Cockburn Quotes
#1. I have a great spouse, Andrew Cockburn, who's also a journalist.
Leslie Cockburn
#2. When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied.' It has certainly been my experience.
John Pilger
#3. Wear the badge of environmental radicalism, and you're a citizen automatically under suspicion.
Alexander Cockburn
#4. But there are times, I would argue, when fiction delivers the greater truth.
Leslie Cockburn
#5. When I was in London at NBC, I was the lowest man on the totem pole. I would go to diplomatic receptions to meet people.
Leslie Cockburn
#6. The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.
Claud Cockburn
#7. The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me.
Bruce Cockburn
#8. After reading Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad when I was a student at Yale, I wanted to live in the world they captured in their books. I had had some experience living in Africa. I was drawn to that kind of adventure.
Leslie Cockburn
#9. You can take me to Petra, and sing for me in the ruins."
"Insha'Allah.
Leslie Cockburn
#10. There was a lot more music than the size of the place would indicate.
Bruce Cockburn
#11. A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.
Alexander Cockburn
#12. When I was at graduate school in London, I began working at NBC News, which had a thriving documentary unit.
Leslie Cockburn
#13. An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.
Claud Cockburn
#14. Journalists are notoriously prone to exaggerate the beneficial impact of elections and to ignore more complex developments.
Patrick Cockburn
#15. I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.
Leslie Cockburn
#16. Got to kick at the darkness 'till it bleeds daylight
Bruce Cockburn
#17. An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.
Patrick Cockburn
#18. Regulation of sexual behavior
is the preferred route to wider social
control.
Alexander Cockburn
#19. Why did you become a journalist?"
"Better than working for a living.
Leslie Cockburn
#20. Everybody wants to see justice done, to somebody else.
Bruce Cockburn
#21. Lee was conscious that Nizar watched her trying to adjust her abaya. She knew everyone could tell a Western woman by her awkwardness and her shoes.
Leslie Cockburn
#22. By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security.
Alexander Cockburn
#23. All these years of thinking, ending up like this: In front of all this beauty, understanding nothing.
Bruce Cockburn
#24. She had done her residency at LA County Hospital, where the CT machines were so old she had to mark off the body parts for scanning with paper clips. She thought Baghdad hospitals might be like that.
Leslie Cockburn
#25. Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.
Alexander Cockburn
#26. There are a lot of people missing in Iraq. Just the other day I heard of somebody asking $250,000 ransom for an Egyptian. Can you imagine? An Egyptian. That's inflation. This war," he said, leaning closer to her, "is all about money.
Leslie Cockburn
#27. I started making little films with a 16 mm camera as an undergraduate at Yale. My first job out of college was 'assistant editor' on a forgettable low budget feature.
Leslie Cockburn
#28. We're confronted with great darkness as a species right now as spiritual creatures on this planet. I don't think it's hopeless, and I don't want 'You've Never Seen Everything' to make people feel hopeless. But I think we've got to call a spade a spade.
Bruce Cockburn
#29. Focusing on skills, communications, and community allows the project to be more effective and more agile than focusing on processes and plans.
Alistair Cockburn
#30. Young Shia who have been brought up with nothing, who are pretty anarchic, pretty dangerous. In 2004 when they came close to killing me, and of course they have killed very large numbers of other Iraqis. That's a major source of strength for Muqtada.
Patrick Cockburn
#31. Little round planet in a big universe, sometimes it looks blessed, sometimes it looks cursed. Depends what you look at obviously, but even more it depends on the way that you see.
Bruce Cockburn
#32. A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.
Alexander Cockburn
#33. The weapon of the advocate is the sword of the soldier, not the dagger of the assassin.
Alexander Cockburn
#36. Lord, spit on our eyes that we may see, how to wake up from this tragedy.
Bruce Cockburn
#37. Some people never see the light Till it shines thru bullet holes.
Bruce Cockburn
#39. I watch the confusion of friends all numb with love moving like stray dogs to the anthem of night long conversations of pulsing rhythms and random voltage voices in spite of themselves graceful as these raindrops creeping spermlike across the car window.
Bruce Cockburn
#40. My models for graceful aging are guys like John Lee Hooker and Mississippi John Hurt, who never stopped working till they dropped, as I fully expect to be doing, and just getting better as musicians and as human beings.
Bruce Cockburn
#41. No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.
Alexander Cockburn
#42. Never underestimate the effectiveness of a straight cash bribe.
Claud Cockburn
#43. I consider C++ the most significant technical hazard to the survival of your project and do so without apologies.
Alistair Cockburn
#44. If you don't keep learning and growing, you're going to stagnate.
Bruce Cockburn
#45. It's a phobia I have. I never assume I'm going to be able to write another album after I finish one.
Bruce Cockburn
#46. I wear my shadows where they're harder to see, but they follow me everywhere. I guess that should tell me I'm travelling toward light.
Bruce Cockburn
#47. Since the early '80s, I've found myself in war zones in various parts of the world.
Bruce Cockburn
#48. Yes, I know, I'm only an artist. What would I know about the dark side of Baghdad?
Leslie Cockburn
#49. A well-functioning team of adequate people will complete a project almost regardless of the process or technology they are asked to use (although the process and technology may help or hinder them along the way).
Alistair Cockburn
#50. Can it be that a generation of school children is growing up heedless of the simple truth that the Pentagon's centrla role for many years has been to buy weapons that don't work, against threats that don't exist?
Alexander Cockburn
#51. Biden said that in Syria the US had found that there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers.
Patrick Cockburn
#52. Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck.
Claud Cockburn
#54. 'Each One Lost' I wrote the day after I got home. My week in Afghanistan was a very short trip, but it was a powerful experience.
Bruce Cockburn
#55. When you do a piece of journalism, you may have to cut away 95 percent of what you are experiencing.
Leslie Cockburn
#57. Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe.
Bruce Cockburn
#58. All I ever thought was, 'I'm going to do this as long as I can, and if I can't get paid at it, I'll be a bum doing it.' And so, here I am.
Bruce Cockburn
#59. They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.
Alexander Cockburn
#60. Though chains be of gold, they are chains all the same.
Bruce Cockburn
#61. A sane person doesn't think war is a good idea. I'm not a pacifist. I feel that there are situations where fighting is inescapable, but we don't go looking for those things.
Bruce Cockburn
#62. Are you more likely to tolerate drivel than you were four years ago? I think the answer is yes. Four years of Reagan has deadenedthe senses against a barrage of uninterrupted nonsense.
Alexander Cockburn
#63. But from the moment George Bush decided to overthrow Saddam, the people who were going to benefit here were the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population. So if you were ever going to have an election, then the Shia would take over.
Patrick Cockburn
#64. I can't imagine my life any other way than it's been.
Bruce Cockburn
#65. A wartime Minister of Information is compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig.
Claud Cockburn
#66. The invitation for artists to compete to see who can be the most charitable is a wonderful thing.
Bruce Cockburn
#67. There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state.
Alexander Cockburn
#68. I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.
Bruce Cockburn
#69. It's always sort of amazing, sitting in Baghdad, to watch visiting dignitaries being received in the Green Zone by politicians who have usually very little support and seldom go outside the Green Zone.
Patrick Cockburn
#70. In between effect and cause and just beyond the range of normal sight, this glittering joker was dancing in the dragon's jaws.
Bruce Cockburn
#71. I remember when the idea of living to be 40 seemed absurd.
Bruce Cockburn
#73. Water of life is gonna flow again/changed from the blood of heroes and knaves/Word mercy's gonna have a new meaning/ when we are judged by the children of our slaves.
Bruce Cockburn
#75. Pose a political threat to Business As Usual, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, someone will try to kill you.
Alexander Cockburn
#76. If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment.
Claud Cockburn
#77. 'Gifts' was just a short little one-verse song that I used to close shows in the '60s.
Bruce Cockburn
#79. The lapis lazuli worry beads, draped over his rear view mirror, swung back and forth like the hips of Scheherazade, Mohammed's favorite belly dancer, who refused, in spite of the war, to leave Baghdad.
Leslie Cockburn
#80. No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.
Alexander Cockburn
#81. Are you a journalist?"
"I'm a doctor."
"Good. We need doctors, Wallahi." Sadoon scowled. "Journalists only tell lies and smuggle carpets.
Leslie Cockburn
#82. Muqtada is radical in the sense that he wants the U.S. occupation to end and has always said so from the beginning. Secondly, his support among the Shia really runs along class lines; it's mainly the poor who support him. His organization runs an enormous social network.
Patrick Cockburn
#83. The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.
Alexander Cockburn
#84. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too
Alexander Cockburn
#85. We are still in the infancy of naming what is really happening on software development projects.
Alistair Cockburn
#86. In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Alexander Cockburn
#87. Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:
Alexander Cockburn
#88. No one believes for a moment the embargo will prompt the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein.
Alexander Cockburn
#89. One day you're waiting for the sky to fall, The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all.
Bruce Cockburn
#90. The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.
Alexander Cockburn
#91. You know, if you want to meet a lot of Iraqi leaders, the best places are the hotels in Amman or in London. In general the government here is amazingly unpopular.
Patrick Cockburn
#92. England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.
Alexander Cockburn
#93. Muqtada leads the only real mass movement in Iraq. It's a mass movement of the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population, and of poor Shia - and most Shia are poor. Otherwise the place is full of sort of self-declared leaders, many of whom spend most of their time outside Iraq.
Patrick Cockburn
#94. I woke up one morning with this song in my head, and the opening line of the song is, 'My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl.'
Bruce Cockburn
#95. I covered the first Gulf War in Saudi Arabia and Israel for ABC News.
Leslie Cockburn
#96. There are some things that could hold it together, notably oil revenues. But at the moment, the much vaunted surge has had a measure of success primarily, to my mind, because Sunni and Shia Iraqis hate and fear each other more these days than they hate and fear the Americans.
Patrick Cockburn
#97. Journalism, for me, has always been a calling. There are things that must be exposed to the light, truths that must be uncovered, stories worth risking your life for.
Leslie Cockburn
#98. If I try to understand what it means to be a Christian, I look at the two instructions that were given in the Bible that are paramount, and those are to love God with all your heart and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That's it.
Bruce Cockburn
#99. A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands.
Claud Cockburn
#100. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend.
Alexander Cockburn
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