“… the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.”
Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey
“For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.”
—
G. K. Chesterton
,
book
All Things Considered
"On the Cryptic and the Elliptic"
All Things Considered (1908)
Context: For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers. The speeches in our time are more careful and elaborate, because they are meant to be read, and not to be heard. And exactly because they are more careful and elaborate, they are not so likely to be worthy of a careful and elaborate report. They are not interesting enough. So the moral cowardice of modern politicians has, after all, some punishment attached to it by the silent anger of heaven. Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.
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G. K. Chesterton 229
English mystery novelist and Christian apologist 1874–1936Related quotes
The Double Helix (1968)
Christopher Isherwood
(1904–1986) English novelist
Diary entry, 20 January 1940, from The Diaries of Christopher Isherwood, vol I: 1939 - 1960, edited by Katherine Bucknell, p. 84<!-- >
Context: If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate — the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters. I fear the way I might behave, if I were exposed to this atmosphere. I shrink from the duty of opposition. I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate.
David Cay Johnston
(1948) Investigative journalist and author
David Cay Johnston; How The One Percent Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (Jun 23, 2009)
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 21
Adlai Stevenson
(1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
As quoted in Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) by Jonathon Green
Clive James
(1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist
'Introduction'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)
Gilbert Murray
(1866–1957) Anglo-Australian scholar
Source: The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929), pp. 101-102
Mark Twain
(1835–1910) American author and humorist
No known source in Twain's works.
The earliest known source is a Usenet post from November 2000 https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=israel.francophones/j_b0peHVcJw/YN5cG6Pdk6QJ.
Disputed
Marshall McLuhan
(1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 7