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NEWSPAPER quotes
It seems really as if our newspapers were busy to spread superstition. Omens and dreams, and prodigies are recorded, as if they were worth minding. The increasing fashion for printing wonderful tales of crimes and accidents is worse than ridiculous, as it corrupts both the public taste and morals. It multiplies fables and crimes, and thus makes shocking things familiar while it withdraws popular attention from familiar truth, because it is not shocking. Surely, extraordinary events have not the best title to our studious attention. To study nature or man, we ought to know things that are in the ordinaiy course, not the unaccountable things that happen out of it.
Newspapers are the schoolmasters of the common people—a greater treasure to them than uncounted millions of gold.
The newspaper is one of the foremost wonders of the modern world. The family that does not take, and carefully read, at least one newspaper, is not living in the nineteenth century.
The press is good or evil according to the character of those who direct it.—It is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper.—Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.
A newspaper should be the maximum of information, and the minimum of comment.
This folio of four pages, what is it but a map of busy life—its fluctuations, and its vast concerns?
Newspapers are the world's cyclopaedia of life; telling us everything from every quarter of the globe.—They are a universal whispering gallery for mankind, only their whispers are sometimes thunders.
In these times we fight for ideas, and newspapers are our fortresses.
Of all the amusements that can possibly be imagined for a hard-working man, after a day's toil, or in its intervals, there is nothing like reading an entertaining newspaper. It relieves his home of its dullness or sameness, and transports him to a gayer and livelier and more diversified and interesting scene.—It accompanies him in his next day's work, and if the paper be anything above the very idlest and lightest, it gives him something to think of besides the mechanical drudgery of his everyday occupation—something he can enjoy while absent, and look forward with pleasure to return to.
A newspaper is the history for one day of the world in which we live, and with which we are consequently more concerned than with those which have passed away, and exist only in remembrance.
The follies, vices, and consequent miseries of multitudes, displayed in a newspaper, are so many admonitions and warnings, so many beacons, continually burning, to turn others from the rocks on which they have been shipwrecked. What more powerful dissuasive from suspicion, jealousy, and anger, than the story of one friend murdered by another in a duel? What caution likely to be more effectual against gambling and profligacy than the mournful relation of an execution, or the fate of a despairing suicide? What finer lecture on the necessity of economy than an auction of estates, houses, and furniture? Talk they of morals? There is no need of Hutcheson, Smith, or Paley. Only take a newspaper, and consider it well; read it, and it will instruct thee.
These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.
Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature—there will be nothing else published but newspapers.
Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth, it will spread from pole to pole, suddenly burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth; it will be the reign of the human mind in all its plenitude; it will not have time to ripen, to accumulate in the form of a book; the book will arrive too late; the only book possible from day to day is a newspaper.
As a mental discipline the reading of newspapers is hurtful.—What can be worse for the mind than to think of forty things in ten minutes.
A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
I read the newspapers to see how God governs the world.
The newspaper press is the people's university.—Half the readers of Christendom read little else.
The careful reader of a few good newspapers can learn more in a year than most scholars do in their great libraries.
They are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, to show virtue her own image; scorn, her own features; and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.
Newspapers should be news-carriers, not news-makers.—There is truth and entertainment enough to print, without fiction or falsehood, and to publish the latter is to betray the former.
The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth century. There is no force compared with it. It is book, pulpit, platform, forum, all in one. And there is not an interest—religious, literary, commercial, scientific, agricultural, or mechanical—that is not within its grasp. All our churches, and schools, and colleges, and asylums, and art galleries feel the quaking of the printing press.
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