American Editor Quotations

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot.

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.

Everything must be carried out in extreme sobriety.

I have made mistakes but I have never made the mistake of claiming that I have never made one.

Journalism is in fact history on the run.

It's not that we poor men are so powerful to be able to banish the devil. It's that God gives us the power.

Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press.

An exorcism is tantamount to a miracle - an extraordinary intervention of God.

There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton's many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.

Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality.

I defied nothing at all. I ignored the law because I didn't know it existed. It didn't occur to me that anyone would want to curb my inspiration.

I was probably being a little cocky, which I do when I feel that I don't know what I'm talking about.

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.

Anderson's muckraking is one of debatable ends constantly used to justify questionable works.

Life for me has been exactly what I thought it would be, a cake, which I have eaten and had too.

Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they're lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.

You can have your titular recognition. I'll take money and power.

I have always fought for ideas - until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

Gail didn't want me commenting on the opinion pages. I was hired by the news department and, despite the rabid assertions of the Times' enemies and detractors, the two really have nothing to do with each other.

The Federal government does not have any information about extraterrestrial life to conceal, and there are no secret projects for me to investigate.

I wouldn't believe him if he said the sun came up in the east.

My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.

The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.

The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty.

I was as repelled by the French as I was attracted by their country.

A pin has as much head as some authors and a good deal more point.

I must be out of it, but I don't know any good journalists who have excused Clinton's problems.

The green-light decision process today consists of maybe of 30 or 40 people.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others.

There are many men whose tongues might govern multitudes if they could govern their tongues.

We made only one real mistake. And even then we were right.

Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be anything else.

We were right about the slush fund. But Sloan did not testify about it to the Grand Jury.

Consistency is the paste jewel that only cheap men cherish.

Right, but there's expertise and then there's inside information. And I think we have to make a distinction.

The green-light meeting, when I first started at Paramount, would consist of maybe three or four of us in a room. Perhaps two or three of us would have read the script under discussion.

If there had been three public editors before me, the body might have absorbed it a little bit better.

It took us about a day and a half to find out what had gone wrong.

Hollywood is going to have to find a way of meeting those profit goals.

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

I think on civilian casualties they could do more. It's actually something I've discussed with the editors involved. They're aware of it, and I'm hopeful that there will be more reporting on that.

They cut about seven minutes from that broadcast, but it was still vital to the story's momentum.

I give Cronkite a whole lot of credit.

One of Brando's problems is that he can't have a conversation with anyone.

If Bill was all id, Hillary is all superego.

I think it's one of the Times' problems that they haven't made it clear to readers what various formats mean.

Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.

Many are the things I guess we'd like to go back in time and rectify the things we didn't do right, eh?

Since Earth-One is where the Flash existed, and Earth-Two had the other super heroes, how about our Earth? There are no super-heroes.

She advised me that my main job would be plotting stories and editing them. I would not have to bother with the artwork, which was a relief.

Much of our quiet time is spent boating and generally loafing at our second home in the 1,000 Islands on the St. Lawrence River.

My father, Raymond F. Yates, was a successful writer of technical nonfiction and such a life seemed a reasonable alternative to real work.

I don't know about "any" publisher. But Katharine Graham and I had been working together for almost seven years and we had come to trust each other.

I don't remember what I did fifty years ago.

Keep public editors around, give readers more access to the editors of the paper, constantly challenge itself, and be aware of its own history.

I sat next to an actor who told me he didn't know anything about John Kerry except he had been a doctor. I realized it truly is another planet.

To Secretary Pena: Fix your busted airport and leave bikes alone and the commuting to us sociopathic drivers.

Consistency is only a paste jewel that cheap men cherish.

Now, I think the likelihood of it failing on something like WMD again is very slight because everybody is aware of how we in the press blew it.

Al-Jazeera should not go unanswered in the Middle East.

They certainly did. They tried to make her look like a "nut case" and they succeeded to some extent.

I just wanted to have fun for myself-I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions.

Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.

Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.

All I know is, when I did it in the Justice League, the summer issues, they sold many percentage points higher than any other issues of the year.

The media" is too big a word. I think there are some reporters who have adopted a "gotcha" mentality, but not in the really good newspapers.