Sunday, July 9, 2017 – The Free Press
If you don’t have this freedom of the press, then all these little fellows are weaseling around and doing their monkey business and they never get caught. ~ Harold R. Medina
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. ~ Abbott Joseph Liebling
Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted. ~ H. L. Mencken
What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to. ~ Hansell B. Duckett
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. ~ Louis D. Brandeis
Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance. ~ William O. Douglas
Everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground. ~ Heywood C. Broun
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. ~ John Morley
We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself “That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.” You never heard a real American talk in that manner. ~ Frank Hague
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test. ~ Samuel Johnson
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have. They demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech. ~ Soren Kierkegaard
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. ~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. ~ David Brinkley
News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising. ~ Lord Northcliffe
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories. ~ Dave Barry
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. ~ A. J. Liebling
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead. ~ Evelyn Waugh
The bad news is that fifty people died in a hotel fire; the good news is that we got exclusive footage. ~ Jessica Savitch
The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place. ~ Christopher Lasch
News reports don’t change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news. ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. ~ Ogden Nash
Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible, ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
In the hierarchy of predatory animals, journalists are the carrion eaters. ~ Jacques Welter
The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it. ~ Alexander Cockburn
People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true. ~ Lewis H. Lapham
There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. ~ Oscar Wilde
In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has. ~ Mark Twain
When you’re watching the news, how many days in a row can you watch that and feel good about yourself and the world? ~ Sandra Bernhard
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. ~ Mohandas Gandhi
Journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive. ~ G. K. Chesterton
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. ~ Ben Hecht
Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space. ~ Rebecca West
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: “President Can’t Swim.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
Think twice before you speak, and then you may be able to say something more insulting than if you spoke right out at once. ~ Evan Esar
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ~ H. P. Lovecraft
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. ~ Henry Steele Commager
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. ~ Tommy Smothers
We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard. ~ Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. ~ Walt Whitman
Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them. ~ Mark Twain
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. ~ Sigmund Freud
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. ~ Heinrich Heine
Every burned book enlightens the world. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The paper burns, but the words fly away. ~ Akiba ben Joseph
Did you ever hear anyone say, “That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?” ~ Joseph Henry Jackson
I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it. ~ Mae West
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both. ~ John Andrew Holmes
Just Above Sunset 