Top 474 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Publishers

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Life is too short to be living somebody else's dream.

The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

Making money is certainly the one addiction I cannot shake.

Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.

Nothing can make you more humble than pain.

A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.

Stocks actually can be a very good hedge against inflation, and short of hyperinflation, stocks will have the ability to increase their dividends to match the rise in prices.

A politician will do anything to keep his job, even become a patriot.

The true success is the person who invented himself.

Speakers are not supposed to waste time on platitudes, but the capacity of this generation for ignoring the obvious and concentrating on the negative and the obscure is immense.

I certainly hope to be a great publisher, and if people want to love me, too, that's even better.

I decided law was the exact opposite of sex; even when it was good, it was lousy.

The primary contribution of government to this world is to elicit, entrench, enable, and finally to codify the most destructive aspects of the human personality.

The challenges are different to different kinds of magazines. News magazines, magazines that have high frequency and news, are going to be challenged, heavily challenged, not just by the Internet but by the whole 24-hour news cycle which has just been getting enhanced.

Inner sunshine warms not only the heart of the owner, but all who come in contact with it.

Now, I went into the Army as a Republican, I came out as a Democrat, and it completely changed my outlook on a lot of things. And when you live side by side with your fellow soldiers and you realize that they're not a number, that they're actually human beings and they have families, it's a lot harder, I think, to talk about sending them to die for things that aren't really that important.

The Defense Department's plan to ban newspaper reporters from pool coverage of military operations is incredible. It reveals the administration to be out of touch with journalism, reality and the First Amendment.

Think until it hurts.

If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they are altered.

An antique is anything old with class.

I don't think leadership demands 'yes' or 'no' answers; I think leadership is providing the forum for making the right decision, which doesn't demand unanimity.

There is no either / or between being competitive and collaborative. You have to be both and decide which in each situation.

Never lose your sense of the superficial.

I've published many biographies over the years and enjoyed working with writers on their research, discussing it, thinking about it and how it revealed their subject - and one day the impulse came to me to write a life of someone. I made a long list of possible subjects and [ Barbara] Stanwyck was on the list.

Coal is the moral choice, particularly for the developing world... The model for the world right now should be Australia. Australia gets it. Scientifically they get it, politically they get it and particularly when it comes to the United Nations, they get it. They are pulling out of this, they are repealing their carbon tax and Canada seems to be intrigued by what Australia is doing.

All of us, I suspect, imagine that a world exists from which we alone have been excluded; all of us have our noses pressed against the glass. But if we contemplate our own lives, not the phantom life on the other side, we might find things in them to envy-a family that’s intact; a job we like; excellent health (the thing we take for granted and on which all happiness depends). Good fortune is there, however sporadic, however modest, however difficult to achieve. The trick is to recognize it.

If you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech.

A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.

[News is] a first rough draft of history.

To live without that enchantment of beauty is to interpret frugality and simple living with a puritan literalism

News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.

To be fair is not enough any more. We must be ferociously fair.

I have never lived through any time in my career when there haven't been grave challenges facing newspapers.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back in the shell.

An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.

It's such a pleasure to write down splendid words—almost as though one were inventing them.

He [Pierre Teilhard de Chardin] was thrilled with the idea that through work in the world human beings were participating in the ongoing extension and consecration of God's creation.

When the people fear a government, they're a tyranny. When a government fears the people, there is liberty.

We live in a world where it has become politically correct to avoid absolutes. Many want all religions to be given the same honor, and all gods regarded as equally true and equally fictitious. But take these same people, who want fuzzy, all-inclusive thinking in spiritual matters, and put them on an airplane. You will find they insist on a very dogmatic, intolerant pilot who will stay on the straight and narrow glidepath so their life will not come to a violent end short of the runway. They want no fuzzy thinking here!

The fountain is my speech. The tulips are my speech. The grass and trees are my speech.

If you believe in the Lord, He will do half the work - but the last half. He helps those who help themselves.

Everything we know has its origin in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings. Then how is it possible that no more than one in one hundred students has ever been exposed to an extended and systematic study of the art and science of question-asking? How come Alan Bloom did not mention this, or E. D. Hirsh, Jr., or so many others who have written books on how to improve our schools? Did they simply fail to notice that the principal intellectual instrument available to hu­man beings is not examined in school?

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

The difference between Marilyn Monroe and the early Pamela Anderson is not that great. What's amazing is that the taste of American men and international tastes in terms of beauty have essentially stayed the same. Styles change, but our view of beauty stays the same.

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

You need fighters like me to battle, because frankly The New York Times and the Washington Post are not going to fight the fights that I do.

Reservation should be under 'Bartlett.' Right, that's two T's. Yes. 'Bart-let-et.'

To read Wilson.. is to be instructed and amused in the highest sense - that is, to be educated.

After college, I went to England and studied for a couple years.

Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life.

I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.

A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

I'm a neat freak... It seems to me that an orderly desk is reflective of an orderly and organized mind, you know?

You wouldn't want to underestimate the perfidy of the government. I have no doubt that the government will need to increase revenues substantially to avoid default on either debt or social welfare promises. How they will increase those revenues, I can't predict.

For me, the Church is the enemy.