“Journalism is a character defect. I think most non-journalists would agree with this. It is life lived at a safe remove: standing off to one side of the parade as it passes, noting its flaws, offering glib and unworkable suggestions for its improvement. Every journalist must know that this is not, really, how a serious-minded person would choose to spend his days. Serious-minded people do things; a journalist chatters about the things serious-minded people do, and so, not coincidentally, avoids having to do them himself. A significant body of research indicates that non-journalists find us insufferable, perhaps for this reason.”

"The Moral Problem"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

Source: 2010s, Does journalism exist? (2010), p. 1.

In page=19
D.V. Gundappa,Sahitya Akademi

Variants: It should be noted that the games of children are not games, and must be considered as their most serious actions.
For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
Book I, Ch. 23
Attributed

On the challenges of a journalist writing a book in “Malcolm Gladwell on Talking to Strangers and how podcasting changed his approach to writing” https://ew.com/books/2019/09/09/malcolm-gladwell-talking-to-strangers-interview/ in EW (2019 Sep 9)

Norway attack suspect had anti-Muslim, pro-Israel views http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=230762/ Jerusalem Post (24 July 2011)
Other

Complexes http://www.hicsuntleones.co.uk/2009/03/complexes.html, Hic Sunt Leones, 22/03/2009

Source: My Life and Work (1922), p. 110. Chapter XII.

In Understanding Power, 2002.
Quotes 2000s, 2002
Context: ... another thing you sometimes find in non-literate cultures is development of the most extraordinary linguistic systems: often there's tremendous sophistication about language, and people play all sorts of games with language. So there are puberty rites where people who go through the same initiation period develop their own language that's usually some modification of the actual language, but with quite complex mental operations differentiating it -- then that's theirs for the rest of their lives, and not other people's. And what all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow, and if you don't have a lot of technology and so on, you do other things. Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way -- so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folks. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports -- so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.