News Quotes

“Why were you lurking under our window?"
"Yes - yes, good point, Petunia! What were you doing under our windows, boy?"
"Listening to the news," said Harry in a resigned voice.
His aunt and uncle exchanged looks of outrage.
"Listening to the news! Again?"
"Well, it changes every day, you see," said Harry.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
― Edward R. Murrow

“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.”
― William Randolph Hearst

“Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Would you like to know your future?

If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator.

So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

[Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America; Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, February 26, 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“كل يوم أكتشف في وطني مجداً جديداً
وعاراً جديداً
أخباراً ترفع الرأس
وأخرى ترفع الضغط”
― محمد الماغوط

“The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca

“Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”
― Arthur Miller

“You totally need to watch the news."
"Can't."
"Why?"
"It's too depressing."
"Right, because hanging with dead people isn't.”
― Darynda Jones, Third Grave Dead Ahead

“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

“You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.”
― Bruce Sterling

“There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of important things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.”
― Abe Kōbō, The Woman in the Dunes

“In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.”
― Edward R. Murrow

“We reveal most about ourselves when we speak about others.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.”
― Wes Nisker

“. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.”
― Edward R. Murrow

“We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late. ”
― Edward R. Murrow

“If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”
― Thomas Sowell

“A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“News is only the first rough draft of history.”
― Alan Barth

“The news is glorified gossip.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana