Claud Cockburn Quotes (9 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Claud Cockburn: 9 quotes0 likes

Famous Claud Cockburn Quotes

“A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands.”

Page 220
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.”

Claud Cockburn

Pages 224-5
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied."”

Claud Cockburn

Page 190
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead."”

Claud Cockburn

Page 139
No such headline has ever been found in The Times at the period in question (the spring and summer of 1929), though one paragraph reads "An earthquake was felt yesterday between Illapel, to the north, and Talca, to the south, in Chile. No damage was done." (August 6, 1929). Source: The Quote... Unquote Newsletter (October, 2000) pp. 2-3.
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's.”

Claud Cockburn

Pages 11-12
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“He [Brendan Bracken] had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig.”

Claud Cockburn

Crossing the Line (New York: Monthly Review Press, [1958] 1960) p. 88

“There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep.”

Claud Cockburn

Page 62
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment.”

Claud Cockburn

Page 237
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)