"'Why were you lurking under our window?'
'Yes - yes, good point, Petunia! What were you doing under our windows, boy?'
'Listening to the news,' said Harry in a resigned voice.
His aunt and uncle exchanged looks of outrage.
'Listening to the news! Again?'
'Well, it changes every day, you see,' said Harry."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
— Edward R. Murrow

"I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories. "
— Dave Barry

"But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. "
— Dave Eggers

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."
— Arthur Miller

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but clones kind of get it wrong because we are promoting individuality and being proud of being yourself. "
— Brian Molko

"Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions."
— Edward R. Murrow

"If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable."
— Edward R. Murrow

"Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.

For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. "
— Edward W. Said

"You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place."
— Bruce Sterling

"There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home."
— Abe Kōbō (The Woman in the Dunes)

"We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late. "
— Edward R. Murrow

"I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers."
— John Twelve Hawks (The Traveler)

". . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

"If you don't care, you won't know, and if you don't know, anything can happen."
— Dr. Joanna Sabo

"Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Ghosts must be all over the country, as thick as the sands of the sea."
— Henrik Ibson

"The type of political culture that accompanies the rise of the corportate media system worldwide looks to be increasingly like that found in the US: in the place of informaed debate or political parties organizing along the full spectrum of opinion, there will be vacuous journalism and elections dominated by public relations, big money, moronic political advertizing and limited debate on tangible issues. It is a world where the market and commercial values overwhelm notions of democracy and civic culture, a world where depoliticization runs rampant, and a world where a wealthy few face fewer and fewer threats of political challenge"
— Wall Street Journal

"My Miracle, living through a Traumatic brain Injury"
— Rodney Barnes

"When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair."
— Christopher Hitchens

"People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were."
— Edward R. Murrow

"We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business."
— Edward R. Murrow

"The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.

With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
— Henry A. Wallace

"Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on what we heard—the politics, the plane crashes and crimes, the large disasters of the day, which we all use to keep the smaller, more long-term sorrows at bay."
— Sue Miller (While I Was Gone)

"I guess the answer to my confusion is obvious: only read one newspaper, and then the world will seem like a much more orderly and rational place."
— David Adesnik

"'What do you think,' she said. Her voice was rapid. 'You want to
marry me, don't you? Don't you think you want to marry me?' Waited for
the wisecrack. As she spoke she changed in some provocative way,
seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool
gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional
second."
— E. Annie Proulx

"The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

""I need a kid like I need a bad heart. A pretty kid is a ticket to trouble... and I'm too old to ask for that. Shit, I haven't even booked Tommy the Face in two years. I'm turning into a jack-off idiot.""
— Edward Bunker (The Animal Factory)