Scorn (16 page)

 

Empire

A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen natives; bring away a couple more by force for a sample; return home and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free licence given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants; and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!
Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver's Travels
. ‘Gulliver on the English system of colonizing'

Civilized men arrive in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers and the Bible.
Havelock Ellis

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilisations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
Samuel Huntingdon

Columbus was not a learned man, but an ignorant. He was not an honourable man, but a professional pirate … To the harmless and hospitable peoples among whom he came he was a terror and a curse …
Ambrose Bierce on Christopher Columbus

I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.
Mark Twain on Cecil Rhodes

It is nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace.
Winston Churchill on Mahatma Gandhi

I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi on being asked his view of Western civilization. Attrib.

A nagging desire to rule the world, or at least to tell it how to behave, is embedded in the genes of every British politician.
Simon Jenkins

[He] speaks like a Buddha and thinks like a serpent … His soul is possessed by British colonialism. Nothing can distract him from his perfidy … The truth has come to light … Chris Patten will stand condemned down the ages.
Wen Wei Po,
the Communist-run newspaper in Hong Kong on Chris Patten, the Governor

 

Journalism

I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures.
Earl Warren on journalism

Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
G.K. Chesterton

Journalism consists in buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it for ten cents a pound.
Cyril Connolly

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
Evelyn Waugh,
Scoop

They are only ten.
Lord Northcliffe, notice to remind staff on his newspaper of the mental age of readers

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
Albert Camus,
The Fall

A journalist is a person who works harder than any other lazy person in the world.
Anonymous

Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper.
Mother Teresa

Bye! I won't miss you.
Cherie Blair, leaving Downing Street for the last time, to the attendant press corps

I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it – a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures.
Hunter S. Thompson

Sometimes I suspect most of the media commentariat are suffering from Munchausen syndrome.
Rebekah Brooks

A journalist is a reporter out of a job.
Mark Twain

All newspaper opinion-writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over, and bayonet the wounded.
Adage

The ordinary is the proper domain of the artist. The extraordinary can safely be left to journalists.
James Joyce

A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
Tom Stoppard,
Night and Day

A drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay.
George Galloway MP on Christopher Hitchens

Ba'athist, short-arse, sub-Leninist, Eastend carpet-bagger.
Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway

Made natural history by metamorphosing from a butterfly to a slug.
George Galloway MP on Christopher Hitchens

How unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled
the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.
Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway

Ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood.
George Galloway on Christopher Hitchens

This is not just a matter of which of us can be the rudest, because I already conceded that to Mr Galloway. Or which of us can be the most cerebral, because he already conceded that to me.
Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Janet Malcolm

The way I had it is all gone now. The bars are gone, the drinkers, gone. There remain the smartest, healthiest newspeople in the history of the business. And they are so boring that they kill the business right in front of you.
Jimmy Breslin

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.
Humbert Wolfe

To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it.
Fred Allen

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
Norman Mailer

I hesitate to say what the functions of the modern journalist may be, but I imagine that they do not exclude the intelligent anticipation of facts before they occur.
Lord Curzon

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
Ben Hecht

A newspaper is a device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
George Bernard Shaw

The government of bullies, tempered by editors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on democracy

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S. Eliot

What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.
Stanley Baldwin on press barons Lord Rothermere and Beaverbrook

Good God, that's done it. He's lost us the tarts' vote.
The 10th Duke of Devonshire on Stanley Baldwin's attack on newspaper proprietors. Attrib.

There are moments when we in the British press can show extraordinary sensitivity: these moments usually coincide with the death of a proprietor, or a proprietor's wife.
Craig Brown

The press is the enemy.
Richard Nixon

Politicians who complain about the media are like ships' captains who complain about the sea.
Enoch Powell

The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.
Grace Kelly

All the faults of the age come from Christianity and Journalism.
Frank Harris

Christianity, of course, but why journalism?
Arthur James Balfour in reply

Frank Harris has been invited to all the great houses in England once.
Oscar Wilde

You lying BBC; you're photographing things that aren't happening.
Belfast woman to a BBC cameraman

To press journalists, television is like a mendacious, boastful cousin who keeps turning up at family parties with a prettier girl and a more powerful motor that you rather hope will end up in a ditch.
Allison Pearson,
Evening Standard

An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.
Adlai Stevenson

Getting information from the internet is like getting a glass of water from Niagara.
Arthur C. Clarke

The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements.
Thomas Jefferson

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
Jerry Seinfeld

It's a wonder none of them crash-landed on the magazine.
Private Eye,
responding to the editor of
Punch's
comment that ‘jokes winged back and forth between the men and women'

The Times
is speechless and takes three columns to express its speechlessness.
Winston Churchill on Irish Home Rule

When it is said of a man that he didn't suffer fools gladly, it means he was an intolerant old brute. When it is said of an old lady that she was lively and vivacious, it means she was usually plastered.
Anthony Howard on the obituarist's code

If I see ‘upcoming' in the paper one more time, I will be downcoming and someone will be outgoing.
Unnamed editor of
The Wall Street Journal

Unreconstructed wankers.
Tony Blair's description of the Scottish media, 1997

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H.L. Mencken

Every item should make our readers hate someone or something, or fear something or someone, a little bit more.
Instruction to a young journalist joining the
Daily Mail
's Wicked Whispers diary column

By office boys for office boys.
Lord Salisbury on the
Daily Mail

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
Norman Mailer

People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate.
Nora Ephron

It's great to be with Bill Buckley, because you don't have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you're right.
John Kenneth Galbraith on William F. Buckley, Jr., right-wing editor of the
National Review

Price of
Herald
three cents daily. Five cents Sunday. Bennett.
Telegram from James Gordon Bennett, American newspaper owner and editor, to William Randolph Hearst, when Hearst, who was trying to buy his paper, asked for a price

I have just seen your submission to the Press Complaints Commission. For sheer, pathetic, childish, toys-out-of-thepram crap, it's hard to beat. Tantrums and tiaras, darlings? Stick them where the sun don't shine.
Piers Morgan in a letter to Sir Elton John's lawyer

I think we fell out when you said ‘I think' and I said ‘I don't give a fuck what you think'.
Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the
Sun,
to a marketing man at the latter's leaving party

Has there ever been a more confusing face? With an expression half-bovine and half sheep-like he stares out of the screen in such a way as to leave us all uncertain whether he wants to cut our throats or lick our boots.
Peregrine Worsthorne on
Sunday Times
editor Andrew Neil, in the
Sunday Telegraph

That is a bit rich coming from a man who looks like a sexually confused, ageing hairdresser: the Teasy Weasy of Fleet Street …
Richard Littlejohn, in the
Sun,
on Peregrine Worsthorne after the latter's attack on Andrew Neil

Rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.
Frank Zappa

A columnist is a person with weak opinions, strongly held.
Adage, adapted

This dodipoule, this didopper … why, thou arrant butter whoe, thou coteueane & scrattop of scoldes, will thou never leave affecting a dead Carcasse … a wispe, a wispe, rippe, rippe, you kitchen-stuff wrangler!
Thomas Nashe, a 16th-century pamphleteer and novelist, on Gabriel Harvey, a contemporary writer. The pair conducted a feud so furious that in 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered all their works to be burned.

One fact, one generalisation, and one very slight inaccuracy.
Hugo Wortham, editor of the
Daily Telegraph
's ‘Peterborough' column, on the ideal contents of a successful diary column item