All political power is primarily an illusion. Illusion. Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors, first a thin veil of blue smoke, then a thick cloud that suddenly dissolves into wisps of blue smoke, the mirrors catching it all, bouncing it back and forth.
All the news business starts with your feet. In New York City, no story happens under the fourth floor.
Don't trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.
Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the streets.
If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.
Media, the plural of mediocrity.
Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.
Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.
Reporting is all about legwork, getting out and finding the story. But all the stories are on the top floors, so you have to learn to climb stairs. That's what reporting is all about, climbing tenement stairs.
The number one rule of thieves is that nothing is too small to steal.
The office of the president is such a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
The only reason this country is different from any place else is that once in a great while, this huge, snobbish, generally untalented news reporting business stops covering stories of interest only to itself and actually serves the public.
The professional arsonist builds vacant lots for money.
Those of Manhattan are the brokers on Wall Street and they talk of people who went to the same colleges; those from Queens are margin clerks in the back offices and they speak of friends who live in the same neighborhood.
When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.
When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.
Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.
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