Quotes About Sound Bites

#1. I think the daily challenge for a lot of beat reporters is, how do you get past the regurgitated sound bites of powerful people or evasion masters who are so used to this routine - the theatricality of press conferences and stage-managed interviews and teams of handlers?

Sarah Stillman

#2. Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street, the battlers, by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them, they are treating them with contempt. It's our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.

Malcolm Turnbull

#3. The media works in sound bites. They can make you look like a genius or stupid.

Kato Kaelin

#4. This new, telegraphic writing style also influenced public speaking: short sound bites became popular because they were easier for stenographers to transcribe, and cheaper and quicker for reporters to transmit.

Tom Standage

#5. As the heated debate continues, it will be important that nonproliferation experts play a critical role in the discourse. Science-based statements, not snarky sound bites, should be the weapons of choice.

David Corn

#6. Something that I've struggled with for awhile is looking at our country voting on sound bites, and to me, character is really important.

Taya Kyle

#7. It's dangerous talking about yourself too much because you find yourself talking in sound bites.

Emily Mortimer

#8. American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.

Siri Hustvedt

#9. Life is much more complex than the black-and-white sound bites that you get on television. There are nuances and shades of gray.

Joe Berlinger

#10. In my box of sound bites there are no jackhammers, no snowmobiles, no Jet Skis, no children wailing. Music but no Muzak.
It's my box. Put what you want in yours.

Joan Oliver Goldsmith

#11. I don't talk in sound bites.

Michael Moore

#12. In an age when stagecraft, gauzy themes, and sound-bites have too often been substituted for leadership, Bill Clinton as a candidate made it essential to campaigning to take the specifics of governance seriously. Practical solutions were 'in;' ideology was 'out.'

Sylvia Mathews Burwell

#13. I know that campaigns can seem small, and even silly. Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. And the truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. If you're sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me - so am I.

Barack Obama

#14. I offer myself as a leader to the people of this country because I think they're looking for solutions, not lawyers arguing over laws or entertainers throwing out sound bites that draw media attention. We need to solve the problem.

Ted Cruz

#15. Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.

Stephen Jay Gould

#16. A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.

Eric San

#17. There are versions of the pro-gay and anti-gay agenda that assume a simplistic rather than simple understanding of the issue - at least from a biblical perspective. Reject it or embrace it: that's the easy choice that makes for great sound-bites but ruins lives.

Michael Horton

#18. In this age of micro-blogging and two second sound bites, almost no one has the attention span, or time, to read more than a few sentences.

Tim Frick

#19. People bring camera phones into comedy shows and clubs and concerts, and sound bites never come out right.

Tracy Morgan

#20. What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.

Gloria Steinem

#21. Courtney Love is a loose cannon. She says what she thinks. She's wild on the red carpet. You get the best sound bites from Courtney Love.

Steven Cojocaru

#22. The reduction of political discourse to sound bites is one of the worst things that's happened in American political life.

John Silber

#23. In a world where people are hungry for quick fixes and sound bites, for instant gratification, there's no patience for the long, slow rebuilding process: implementing after-school programs, hiring more community workers to act as mentors, adding more job training programs in marginalized areas.

Dan Hill

#24. But the Republican right-wing agenda, these people - Arnold and his patrons - felt it could be accomplished by circumventing the Legislature and spending money and organizing and giving sound bites.

Warren Beatty

#25. Speaking of Twitter, I don't even know if I composed a blog entry in 2009, as I was too busy parceling my every thought into cute 140-character sound bites. I used to only worry about being pithy for a living; now some of my best lines are wasted on a free app!

Diablo Cody

#26. Life is infinitely complex, and I feel like we live in a culture that really seems to want to simplify it into sound bites and bromides, and that does not work.

Alan Ball

#27. I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.

Leon Kass

#28. By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.

Sydney Pollack

#29. In regards to your love life, you're just entering into a whole of pain if you talk about it. If you've never said anything, there are no sound bites to haunt you when you're crying into a box of Kleenex after it all goes wrong.

Lily James

#30. You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like 'shooting an unarmed child,' when that 'child' was beating him bloody.

Thomas Sowell

#31. It's time that we move from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions.

Hillary Clinton

#32. We live in an age where people are like, "I'd love to catch up. Maybe text me later? But don't call because I don't really listen to my messages. But if you text me ... " We've displaced interaction into sound bites and untethered phrases and sentences that come up on the phone as Twitter feed.

Marc Maron

#33. What is Africa, anyway? Even I don't know what Africa is, entirely. But I know that it's not some of these simplified sound bites you hear in America.

Wangechi Mutu

#34. Like most so-called debates between liberals and conservatives, they weren't interested in listening or responding to each other. They were solely concerned with making sound bites.

Bob Frey

#35. If Americans want to see results instead of rhetoric, if taxpayers would like solutions instead of sound bites, and hard work instead of horse trading, I suggest you take a short look, and it won't take much longer, at the accomplishments of this Congress.

Alcee Hastings

#36. Never trust a man who bites the heads off chickens is probably a good sound rule of practice.

Kerry Greenwood