A.J. Liebling Quotes

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

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

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

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.

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

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

Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.

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.

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.

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

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

I can write better than anyone who can write faster.

I had an attack of the gout two days before pulling out, and I went limping off to the war instead of coming limping back from it.

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.

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

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

It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum.

Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.

No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.

I used to be shy about ordering a steak after I had eaten a steak sandwich, but I got used to it.

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

My old friend looked at me with a new respect. He was discovering in me a capacity for hypocrisy that he had never credited me with before.

My sympathies have always been with the everyday people... the center of my photography.

The country's present supply of foreign news depends largely on how best a number of dry goods merchants in New York think they can sell underwear.

A city with one newspaper... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

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

Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.

Newspapers write about other newspapers with circumspection, ... about themselves with awe, and only after mature reflection.

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

Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.

I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.