“[T]he man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“Newspapers… serve as chimneys to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“Journalists are a sort of assassins, who sit with loaded blunderbusses at the corner of streets and fire them off for hire or for sport at any passenger they may select.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“I cannot, whilst President of the United States, descend to enter into a newspaper controversy.”
—JAMES K. POLK
“I would honor the man who would give to his country a good newspaper.”
—RUTHERFORD B. HAYES
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from a corn field.”
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
“I may go into a strange bedroom every now and then that I don’t want you to write about, but otherwise you can write everything.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but stand there and take it.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“We’ve uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“Half the time when I see the evening news, I wouldn’t be for me, either.”
—BILL CLINTON
“No matter how good I do on something, they’ll never write good. I mean, they don’t write good. They don’t know how to write good. And I guess if they did, they’re certainly not doing it.”
—DONALD TRUMP, on the New York Times