C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Newspaper
Newspapers are the world’s mirrors.
The educators of the common people.
The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.
In these times we fight for ideas, and newspapers are our fortresses.
In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands.
The highest reach of a news-writer is an empty reasoning on policy, and vain conjectures on the public management.
The newspaper is a greater treasure to the people than uncounted millions of gold.
Printer’s ink is the great apostle of progress, whose pulpit is the press.
Every editor of newspapers pays tribute to the devil.
Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature.
Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body.
Over no nation does the press hold a more absolute control than over the people of America, for the universal education of the poorest classes makes every individual a reader.
These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.
The careful reader of a few good newspapers can learn more in a year than most scholars do in their great libraries.
Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in congress.
The follies, vices, and consequent miseries of multitudes, displayed in a newspaper, are so many admonitions and warnings, so many beacons, continually burning, to turn others from the rocks on which they have been shipwrecked.
The press, important as is its office, is but the servant of the human intellect, and its ministry is for good or for evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill which grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain, and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.
Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light—instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremeties of the earth.
A newspaper, like a theatre, must mainly owe its continuance in life to the fact that it pleases many persons; and in order to please many persons it will, unconsciously perhaps, respond to their several tastes, reflect their various qualities, and reproduce their views. In a certain sense it is evolved out of the community that absorbs it, and, therefore, partaking of the character of the community, while it may retain many merits and virtues, it will display itself, as in some respects ignorant, trivial, narrow, and vulgar.