I. F. Stone quotes

Rich people march on Washington every day. (I. F. Stone)

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

I. F. Stone

The difference between burlesque and the newspapers is that the former never pretended to be performing a public service by exposure.

I. F. Stone

Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.

I. F. Stone

All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.

I. F. Stone

There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

I. F. Stone

The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising.

I. F. Stone

Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda.

I. F. Stone

If God, as some now say, is dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem.

I. F. Stone

A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.

I. F. Stone

I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity. (I. F. Stone)

I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had called "the significant trifle" - the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation.

I. F. Stone

The only thing God didn't do to Job was give him a computer.

I. F. Stone

If you live long enough, the venerability factor creeps in; first, you get accused of things you never did, and later, credited for virtues you never had.

I. F. Stone

Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.

I. F. Stone

The press, which dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the anti-war speeches of Morse and Gruening, ignored this one, too.

I. F. Stone

What the world (and particularly the White House) needs to remember is that aggression is unleashed and escalated when one party to a dispute decides for itself who is guilty and how he is to be punished.

I. F. Stone

The American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public.

I. F. Stone

There's a lot of things those journalists know, that I don't know, but a lot of it is wrong.

I. F. Stone

Professor Einstein would not have liked a stuffy tribute. My wife and I loved him. He was a charter subscriber to the Weekly, and often strained its primitive bookkeeping facilities by renewing when no renewal was due. We and our three children had the great pleasure on several occasions of having tea with him at his home. It was like going to tea with God, not the terrible old God of the Bible but the little child's father-in-heaven, very kind, very wise and yet himself very much like a child, too...

I. F. Stone

This is what is happening in Cyprus, where we have been begging Greeks and Turks to desist from the murderous escalation of reprisal and counter reprisal. Johnson practices in Southeast Asia what he deplores in the Mediterranean.... (I. F. Stone)

Our reprisal raids on North Vietnam hardly conformed to these standards. By our own account, in self-defense, we had already sunk three or four attacking torpedo boats in two incidents. In neither were our ships damaged nor any of our men hurt; indeed, one bullet imbedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the second of the attacks even took place. To fly sixty-four bombing sorties in reprisal over four North Vietnamese bases and an oil depot, destroying or damaging twenty-five North Vietnamese PT boats, a major part of that tiny navy, was hardly punishment to fit the crime....

I. F. Stone

The first was the raid by U.S. Navy planes in June on Pathet Lao headquarters in Laos in retaliation for shooting down two reconnaissance planes. We would not hesitate to shoot down reconnaissance planes over our own territory; such overflights are a clear violation of international law. But the U.S. now seems to operate on the principle that invasion of other people's skies is our right, and efforts to interfere with it (at least by weaker powers) punishable by reprisal. This is pure "might is right" doctrine...

I. F. Stone