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I. F. Stone Quotes

I. F. Stone was a politically progressive American investigative journalist, writer, and author.He is best remembered for I. F. Stone's Weekly , a newsletter ranked 16th among the top hundred works of journalism in the U.S., in the twentieth century, by the New York University journalism department, in 1999; and second place among print journalism publications. Wikipedia  

✵ 24. December 1907 – 18. June 1989
I. F. Stone photo
I. F. Stone: 15 quotes0 likes

Famous I. F. Stone Quotes

“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.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly (1971-12-14)

“A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.”

I. F. Stone

I.F. Stone's Weekly (1967-08-03)

“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 Haunted Fifties (1963)

“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

I.F. Stone's Weekly (1954-03-15)

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

I. F. Stone

In a Time of Torment, 1961-1967 (1967), p. 317

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

I. F. Stone

I.F. Stone's Weekly (1963-01-21)

I. F. Stone Quotes

“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

I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly (1969-05-19)

“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

The Haunted Fifties (1963)

“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

NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (5 September 2006)

“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

NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (5 September 2006)

“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

NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (5 September 2006)

“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

NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (5 September 2006)

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

I. F. Stone

NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (5 September 2006)

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

I. F. Stone

Quoted in the Ottawa Citizen, As timely as Trump, a documentary about political deceit and feisty, independent journalism by Peter Hum https://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/all-governments-lie (7 February 2017)

“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

Stone's obituary tribute to Einstein, April 1955, reprinted in The Best of I. F. Stone and quoted in I. F. Stone Remembered, 22 September 2006, radioopensource.org http://radioopensource.org/if-stone-remembered/,

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