A. J. Liebling quotes

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. (A. J. Liebling)
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. View quote
A. J. Liebling
An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed. View quote
A. J. Liebling
Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments. View quote
A. J. Liebling
The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. View quote
A. J. Liebling
If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total. View quote
A. J. Liebling
To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris. View quote
A. J. Liebling
The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money. View quote
A. J. Liebling
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better. View quote
A. J. Liebling
The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business. View quote
A. J. Liebling
A Louisiana politician can't afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department. (A. J. Liebling)
There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor. View quote
A. J. Liebling
If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior. View quote
A. J. Liebling
It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life. View quote
A. J. Liebling
Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows. View quote
A. J. Liebling
Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place. View quote
A. J. Liebling
If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it. View quote
A. J. Liebling
You can hope for lucky encounters only if you walk around a lot. View quote
A. J. Liebling
A man´s taste is formed more by his culture, his profession, and the period in which he is young than by his race or politics. View quote
A. J. Liebling
As a result of its generous stand [Robert Maynard Hutchins' controversial policy of admitting students after their second year of high-school], the University of Chicago's undergraduate college acts as the greatest magnet for neurotic juveniles since the Children's Crusade, with Robert Maynard Hutchins...playing the role of Stephen the Shepherd Boy. View quote
A. J. Liebling
The subject [of Stalin's death] permitted a rare blend of invective and speculation-both Hearst papers, as I recall, ran cartoons of Stalin being rebuffed at the gates of Heaven, where Hearst had no correspondents-and I have seldom enjoyed a week of newspaper reading more. (A. J. Liebling)
Show me a poet, and I'll show you a shit. View quote
A. J. Liebling
The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young. View quote
A. J. Liebling
I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy. View quote
A. J. Liebling
The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels. View quote
A. J. Liebling