A. J. Liebling Quotes

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."

"No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane."

"If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it."

"I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy."

"The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down."

"An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed."

"If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total."

"The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young."

"Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place."

"A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass."

"It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life."

"The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money."

"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."

"The way to write is well, and how is your own business."

"If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior."

"There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor."

"A Louisiana politician can't afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department."

"The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels."

"An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed."