A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.

Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.

When a dog bites a man that's not news. If a man bites a dog, that's news.

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

Always verify your references.

All I know is what I read in the papers.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Journalism is in fact history on the run.

The questions are brutal because research of truth is a kind of surgery.

Journalism is organized gossip.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people -including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

In city rooms and in the bars where newspeople drink, you can find out what's going on. You can't find it in the papers.

Put it to them briefly, so they will read it; clearly, so they will appreciate it; picturesquely, so they will remember it; and above all, accurately, so they will be guided by its light.

Harmony seldom makes a headline.

We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost for ever, even to the protagonists.

A good reporter remains a skeptic all his life.

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.