One of the truths that grow truer as a man's experience accumulates is this very old one: that men need a religion primarily to prevent them from worshipping idols.

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realize that they can become an aristocracy.

The curse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism which is the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer than the people for whom we write, whereas, in fact, we are generally even stupider.

For continuous and systematic secrecy you need an advanced civilization. For continuous and systematic secrecy you need good taste and gentlemanly feeling and other unpleasant things. Above all, for continuous and systematic secrecy you need journalism.

I think I owed my success (as the millionaires say) to having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Between newspaper stunts and newspaper suppressions on the one side, and dictatorships with their censorships on the other, it is highly probable that our immediate posterity will know less about what is going on than they did before there was a printing press.

Being properly educated means not believing newspapers after you have read them.

Very few indeed of the ten million men who read newspapers know that there are only about ten men who own them.

It has been the great tragedy of our time that people were taught to read and not taught to reason.

I would make a law by which an editor, proved to have published false news without reasonable verification, should simply go to prison.

Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern.

Everything in a newspaper that is not the old human love of altar or fatherland is the old human love of gossip.

The curse of current newspaper-reading is that men hear only the latest news about something that is entirely new to them.