Top 24 Quotes & Sayings by John Gunther

What interested me was not news, but appraisal. What I sought was to grasp the flavor of a man, his texture, his impact, what he stood for, what he believed in, what made him what he was and what color he gave to the fabric of his time.

If a man's from Texas, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him by asking?

There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.

The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second, is to find out who will tell you.

It's the equivalent of putting on the brakes suddenly while driving uphill.

The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.

All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.

One travels like a golf ball, hopping from green to green.

Arkansas is a curious and interesting community ... it is probably the most untouched and unawakened of all American states.

Moscow is the city where if Marilyn Monroe should walk down the street with nothing on but shoes, people would stare at her feet first.

What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was the belief in facts.

Touch water in the West and you touch everything.

Old and new kiss everywhere in Africa

He was trying to save both his faces.

Yemen produces coffee, Egypt cotton, Iraq dates, Palestine oranges, and Syria trouble.

[Chicago] is the greatest and most typically American of all cities. New York is bigger and more spectacular and can outmatch it in other superlatives, but it is a "world" city, more European in some respects than American.

Live while you live, then die and be done with.

God is what's good in me.

New York city, the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean Paradox, the inferno with no-out-of bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States. It meets the most severe test that may be applied to definition of a metropolis - it stays up all night. But also it becomes a small town when it rains.

I have so much to do! And there's so little time!

France is the most civilized country in the world and doesn’t care who knows it.

The camera is one of the greatest liars of our time.