“Those who dumb down the news, trivialize the news with in-studio shouting matches passing for debate, those who tart up the news with celebrity gossip, scandal and sensationalism are playing right into the hands of those that stand to gain the most from the news being seen as irrelevant and trivial and no more or less worth your attention than the next episode of 'American Idol.' […] I worry that if it becomes no more than a reality show, something that could be scripted and rigged behind the scenes without anyone really getting upset about it, that our freedom of the press will become another one of those constitutionally granted rights that can be watered down and eventually taken away from us.”

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 33

Source: Fiction, The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983), The Urth of the New Sun (1987), Chapter 13, "The Battles" (p. 95)

Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by W. K. Marriott

"Demonstrations over Islamic centre held in New York" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11274010, BBC, 11 September 2010.
2010s

Remark (9 January 1978), as quoted in Transitions to a Heart Centered World : Through the Kundalini Yoga and Meditations of Yogi Bhajan (1988) by Guru Rattana and Ann M. Maxwellm, p. 107
Context: Take new values : Leave behind a legend to be followed by those who follow you. Be a yogi — don't be an ordinary person.

Introduction
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40)
Context: Nothing is more usual and more natural for those, who pretend to discover anything new to the world in philosophy and the sciences, than to insinuate the praises of their own systems, by decrying all those, which have been advanced before them. And indeed were they content with lamenting that ignorance, which we still lie under in the most important questions, that can come before the tribunal of human reason, there are few, who have an acquaintance with the sciences, that would not readily agree with them. 'Tis easy for one of judgment and learning, to perceive the weak foundation even of those systems, which have obtained the greatest credit, and have carried their pretensions highest to accurate and profound reasoning. Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are every where to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Source: Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked, (2012), p. 183

The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (1951), Ch. 54: The Practice
General sources
Context: What is the use of reading the common news of the day, the tragic deaths and abuses of daily living, when for over half a lifetime we have known that they must have occurred just as they have occurred given the conditions that cause them? There is no light in it. It is trivial fill-gap. We know the plane will crash, the train be derailed. And we know why. No one cares, no one can care. We get the news and discount it, we are quite right in doing so. It is trivial. But the hunted news I get from some obscure patients' eyes is not trivial. It is profound: whole academies of learning, whole ecclesiastical hierarchies are founded upon it and have developed what they call their dialectic upon nothing else, their lying dialectics. A dialectic is any arbitrary system, which, since all systems are mere inventions, is necessarily in each case a false premise, upon which a closed system is built shutting out those who confine themselves to it from the rest of the world. All men one way or another use a dialectic of some sort into which they are shut, whether it be an Argentina or a Japan. So each group is maimed. Each is enclosed in a dialectic cloud, incommunicado, and for that reason we rush into wars and prides of the most superficial natures.
Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us.