Selected media quotes

1. Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it....

2. Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance.

3. For I must write to The Times tonight, and save the world from sin.

4. The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

5. It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.

6. To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.

7. A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

8. How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes.

9. Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

10. The tribunal here and your American newspapers talk so much about our sharp Nazi methods, but do you realize that within the past year, since the defeat of Germany, 1 million Germans have been evicted from what was originally German territory and which has now been given to Poland? No League of Nations or other body intervened.

11. We must build a trickle-up media that reflects the true character of this country and its people. A democratic media serving a democratic society.

12. Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

13. I met someone on the street who said wasn't it great that we're going to have a movie star for president, that it was so Pop, and (laughs) when you think about it like that, it is great, it's so American.

14. When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

15. I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts.

16. I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

17. I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.

18. You don't want the Republicans in power, does that mean you want a dictatorship, gay boy?

19. Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

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

21. If I blow my nose, it gets written all over the world.

22. I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It's such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don't want to be a sex symbol.

23. The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

24. Darwinism is still very much alive, utterly dominating biology. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to prove the creation of a single distinct species by Darwinist means, Darwinism dominates the academy and the media.

25. Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

26. Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

27. To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

28. I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.

29. Is it against the law to kill a reporter?

30. I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

31. Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.

32. The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!

33. The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.

34. We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

35. All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

36. I certainly think that when I flick through all the magazines at the hairdresser's I like to see and am drawn to images that have an intelligence and mind at work behind them.

37. As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.

38. The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.

39. My Fox guys, I love every single one of them.

40. I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.

41. Look for Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr in the Commons, our repository for free images, music, sound, and video.

42. Oprah is different. Oprah has an army out there that really listens. She's one of the great marketing machines in history.

43. So far, I don't see anything negative on this woman. I think she's a real icon. She's much more complex and complicated than just a talk show host. Maya Angelou has said she sees her as a true missionary. Everybody has a different take on Oprah.

44. She's -- her great strength, if anybody watches the show -- and I think everybody does in Iowa; it's the number one show in Iowa -- she's instructive. She's empowering. Every time you watch an Oprah broadcast, at the end of it, you know more than you started and you feel stronger. That's her strength.

45. Damn, but they've got us brainwashed, haven't they!

46. Fiction is a very poor tool for conversion, because if I label it as fiction then I'm telling you it's a pack of lies from the very start.

47. If I read it in the newspapers, it's probably wrong. If I read it in the major news magazines, it's hopelessly wrong.

48. 'We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes...' (pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice) This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?

49. The Saudi Arabian Human Rights Commision--- Now, that's a collection of words to boggle the mind, but apparently this organization does actually exist.

50. Mr. Libby's story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true. It was false. He was at the beginning of the chain of the phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And he lied about it afterward, under oath and repeatedly.

51. (Paul, Jr.) -- 'Paul Harvey ... News & Comment. Brought to you by _____________________. Now ... Paul Harvey News.'

52. Republicans always pull down the shades though there is seldom a reason. Democrats never pull down the shades though they always should.

53. Of course, it was not a true uprising of the people. It was inspired by America and other agents. The 'Voice of America' really started it.

54. When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.

55. TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.

56. Earlier generations went to see what was forbidden in life and developed a real excitement about the movies. Today's rating system keeps kids out of the good ones. I wouldn't want them to see movies like Natural Born Killers, but my tendency is you're better off seeing things than not. That glazed indifference kids develop can be worse than over-excitement.

57. The most ordinary thing like appearing on Clive James fills me with panic, I don't much enjoy being on television. I'd rather be sarcastic to myself. I'd rather do it for a few people socially, but it would be a bit rude to take up a collection after dinner.

58. He got used early to the adulation of a wide public and eventually decided that he could do without it; long before the end, fame had to chase him far harder than he chased it. But among his fellow practitioners his lustre was undimmed, unequalled. and unchallenged... Just as the astronauts riding up on their rockets all worshipped Chuck Yeager, the jet pilot who never joined them in space because he flew too well with wings, so the media millionaires all knew that Cook was the unsurpassable precursor who had done it all before they did, and done it better. ~ Clive James, in an online tribute.

59. Basically there's a gulf between truth and untruth, I don't want to be too mathematical about it, because I'm not very good at maths. But it's a divide between, I dunno, a film and a cartoon. I've just become this cartoon character. I try not to follow it, but when you see pictures of yourself that have been photo-shopped to show you doing something you didn't:. that's wrong. It's my worst nightmare - and being misquoted, too, especially as I'm so precious about words.

60. You've got to understand... these days I just can't afford to get involved [with the press]. People - they turn on you... on me. They write horrible things, deliberately twisting my words.

61. I mean you look in the paper and you see the bodies of mutilated people, and that's sexy. Controversy isn't saying something like 'Oh I've fucked Noel Gallagher' or something. Which I have.

62. The red-faced president took afternoon tea With her majesty The Queen And they watched old films flicker Across the old palace movie screen Crying, 'What a shame!' As she slipped in the rain Poor dancing girl Well, she won't dance again...

63. He's a sweet kid, I've met him a few times. He's not the genius everyone makes him out to be. In fact, far from a genius if his new album's anything to go by. He'll go down in history as a Morrissey and Marr or Lennon and McCartney type character. Him and Carl were great for each other. Apart they'll probably be shocking. There's a lot of hypocrisy in the British press about drugs. The people who write the stories are usually off their heads on cocaine anyway.

64. Both constructs of the aphorism hold true. But, because it is an American convention to adore common people without restriction, I elect here to criticize them, as a lesson. A society which cannot criticize its masses is hamstrung-as ours is. For it is our American common people, and not the highly educated ones, who have chucked overboard the critical method and thereby cut loose the ship of state from its sounding machinery, its rudder, its glass, and its keel, leaving the whole business to drift where the blather of common men blows it.

65. For Dick Cheney, it must have felt just like any other day at the office: Folks who don't shave, don't bathe, and want him dead. Wow, feels just like back home!

66. Al Gore could really pollute a bathroom ... Just look at the guy. If someone doesn't take away his pork 'n' beans, he's bound to get another one of those 'gut feelings' and mistake his own greenhouse gas production for science!

67. She has very passionate opinions...she's articulate, intelligent, and we get a lot of favorable mail about her.

68. I think they just thought she would be a good kind of lightning rod. We did one or two rehearsals, and I know for a fact that people liked her legs.

69. [just cheated on HOOK UP MY SPACE! and camera just zoomed in on Raven] Hey, America, How yall doin'.

70. Now that is ridiculous. I mean, who would watch a show about a teen psychic?

71. [Television is] a really dreadful influence on all of us. Don't ever look at local television news again. It's all crap. There's no news, there's no information. It's negative, negative, negative. You look at that, and you think the world is coming to an end.

72. Experience has shown that the mass-armies of 'democratic' states fight with greater zeal when they are animated by hatred and supported by a hate-crazed populace that fancies it is fighting a holy war. Lies have therefore become military equipment, a kind of mental logistics; but it is the essence of such propaganda that its spuriousness is known only to the persons who manufacture it. The model of such operations is the famous lie-factory managed by Lord Bryce during the First World War, in which a corps of expert technicians forged photographs, while expert liars, including Arnold Toynbee, concocted stories, of 'atrocities,' to inspire the emotionally overwrought British with a fanatical hatred of the incredibly bestial Germans and with a noble Christian ardor to kill them.

73. You can't even go out with a celebrity and have a good time without people making s**t up.

74. 'Great news! bloody news!' cried a newsman; The Devil said, 'Stop, let me see!' 'Great news? bloody news?' thought the Devil; 'The bloodier the better for me.'

75. When did Ted Kennedy become Jabba The Hutt? He's huge! You're a Kennedy, not a Macy's Day float. 'Bring him down! We're voting!'

76. 'Cause they've got 'The Chamber', 'The Chair', 'Fear Factor', and people in Texas are saying, 'We got those shows. We just don't film 'em!'

77. Censors feel they are safe from objectionable material but must protect others who are not as smart or moral. The same impulse tempts the reviewer of 'The Believer'... If the wrong people get the wrong message - well, there has never been any shortage of wrong messages. Or wrong people.

78. Writing daily film criticism is a balancing act between the bottom line and the higher reaches, between the answers to the questions, (1) Is this movie worth my money?, and (2) Does this movie expand or devalue my information about human nature? Critics who write so everybody can understand everything are actually engaging in a kind of ventriloquism - working as their own dummies. They are pretending to know less than they do. But critics who write for other critics are hardly more honest, since they are sending a message to millions that only hundreds will understand. It's a waste of postage.

79. It's already getting more and more difficult to make an ambitious and original film. There are less and less independent producers or independent companies and an increasing number of corporations who are more interested in balance sheets than in artistic achievement. They want to make a killing each time they produce a film. They're only interested in the lowest common denominator because they're trying to reach the widest audience. And you got some kind of entropy. That's the danger; they look more alike, those films. The style is all melting and it all looks the same. Even young directors- for most of them, their only standard of achievement is how well their films do on the first weekend or whatever. It worries me. But then, from time to time, you have a film like The Usual Suspects or.... I'm trying to think of something American with some kind of originality... Pulp Fiction.

80. The smoke from burning marijuana contains many more cancer causing substances than tobacco. And if that isn't enough it leads to bronchitis and emphysema. If adults want to take such chances that is their business. But surely the communications media ... should let four million youngsters know what they are risking.

81. I am paying for this microphone!

82. The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don't think he deserves it.

83. Well, among other things, it seems Rudy's a bit of a fibber. Says one thing one, then denies it a few hours later, apparently not familiar with the concept of audio and video recordings.

84. Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.

85. Liberal sportswriters have pushed the notion that it's unfair that there haven't been more black quarterbacks, and I agree with that. I have simply said that their desire for McNabb to do well has caused them to rate him a little higher than perhaps he actually is.

86. My comment was actually a comment aimed at the media, not even at McNabb. It's not by any stretch of the imagination a putdown. It doesn't say McNabb is bad.

87. I'm not the one that's even introduced race in this, if you want to know the truth. You can go back. You can read Philadelphia sports media last year, the year before, and you can see that guys have been writing about the great things that Donovan McNabb's success means in a racial context.

88. I was comparing McNabb's reputation on the field to his reputation in the media. The media has portrayed Donovan McNabb as a great quarterback, and they have credited him almost exclusively with the Eagles' success, and I've always thought that there were more components to the Eagles' success than just the quarterback.

89. I'm just watching Sen. 'Dick Turban,' ah, Dick Turban is doing his - from Illinois - he of Club G'itmo fame. Ha! I wish Roberts would have shown up in the Club G'itmo T-shirt today. Maybe, maybe a Club G'itmo java coffee cup, just for Dick Turban. Ah, but anyway, Dick Turban.

90. I can do better running commentary of what Jimmy Carter says than of him actually saying it.

91. Liberal talk radio is nothing more than a pimple on the rear end of a pig.

92. I'm just telling you that the - the - the orgy and the orgasm that has been taking place in the media since Friday and with the Democrats is - it's all coordinated, and it's all - it's all oriented toward the election. There's no concern about the kid - no concern about the children.

93. The media, the sports media, has got social concerns that they are first and foremost interested in, and they're dumping on this guy - Rex Grossman - for one reason, folks, and that's because he is a white quarterback ...They, they just want this guy not to do well 'cause he's a white quarterback ... But the guy's been targeted for destruction.

94. The Jesse MacBeth story was done early morning on Tuesday, September 25th on our 600-plus radio stations around the country as a Morning Update, we call it. The video podcast of that update went out Monday afternoon to our subscribers at RushLimbaugh.com. The Jesse MacBeth story and all the other stories, Scott whatever his name was from the New Republic, and there are any number of them - had been told on this show for weeks and months prior to this phone call on Wednesday where you lift the term 'phony soldiers' and try to create a smear out of it.

95. I know these people like I know every square inch of my glorious naked body.

96. I'm doing what I was born to do. That's host. You're doing what you were born to do. That's listen. Together, we make a heck of a team.

97. Compared to some talk radio hosts, racism is not central to Rush Limbaugh's shtick. But there has been a pattern of commentary indicating his willingness to exploit prejudice against blacks to further his on-air arguments.

98. Rush Limbaugh makes more serious points while clowning around than a whole page full of New York Times columnists make while being solemn and pompous.

99. My initial reaction is disgust. How someone can sit in that chair and say that I am a car bomber or - excuse me, a suicide bomber - is disgusting. I have seen the after-effects of a suicide bomb. I have friends that were hurt by suicide bombs. It makes me mad down to a place where I can't even think to describe. It's just repugnant.

100. Who's off his meds and is exaggerating the effects of his illness? Comedian Rush Limbaugh, that's who!