9 Tom Stoppard Quotes on Media

Tom Stoppard quotes on media

16. Tzara: Causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war. Carr: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it? Tzara: Was it? I thought it was Serbia... Carr: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration.

23. A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

25. Wagner: There were printers getting more than journalists! Milne: Yes, I know, but you make it sound as if the natural order has been overthrown. Fish sing in the streets, rivers run uphill, and the printers are getting more than the journalists. Okay - you're worth more than a printer. But look at some of this - 'We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!' 'Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!' It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it - is that radical enough for you - Dick?

26. The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

27. Milne: No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable. Ruth: I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand.

28. Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.

29. I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.

30. Mageeba: Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner? Wagner: Not exactly, sir, no. Mageeba: I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.

58. I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.