Quotes about News

One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history

I have not been to Jerusalem,
but Shirley talks about the bombs.
I have no god, but have seen the children praying
for it to stop. They pray to different gods.
The news is all old news again, repeated
like a bad habit...

The average American child sees 20,000 murders in TV before reaching age 18.  This is considered normal.  Every community has video rental stores filled with multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other.  If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience.  The authors of thousands of books pu

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

What do you suppose has changed in twenty-five years or so? I found the journal to be well written back then when someone or other left it behind. I thought it set things out rather nicely, addressing the events of the day, which are, of course, the same events of this day. Think of it. Even if its theater and its motives are being played out in a different geography, there's still war, isn't there? Still avidity and hate and violence and fear. Poverty and righteousness are still thriving. As are revolution and arrogance and lies. There is always perversion and torment, of course. What I particularly admired about this paper was the shrewd touch of pathos and poignancy strewn among the squalor and the filth. You know, The Good News... 

Should nostalgia move me, I can view the nightly news broadcasts from Rome or Milan. As I might an old movie. But unlike when I watch an old movie, the news broadcasts leave me empty, angry, and I must tell myself yet again that one need tune in only once in a lifetime to the nightly news to know the chronic story of man. To know how wrong the world is. How wronged it is.

Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

"Don't you understand anything?  Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other?  That's how we get things done.  Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers.  If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us--to refute the enemy slanders.  Of course we're non-political.  The real power always is." -Miss Hardcastle.

Is it not late?  A late time to be living?  Are not our generations the crucial ones?  For we have changed the world.  Are not our heightened times the important ones?  For we have nuclear bombs.  Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes?  No, we are not and it is not.  These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other.  Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...
Take away the bomb threat and what are we?  Ordinary beads on a never-ending string.  Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...
There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times.  Plague?  Funny weather?  Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news?  Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them.  Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them.  New diseases, shifts in power, floods!  Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?