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"Conditions were so hard. To send the news out, telex was the only means, but telex was very rare in Africa. So if somebody was flying to Europe, we gave him correspondence to send after he arrived."
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"Deep Throat did serve the public interest by providing the guidance and information to us."
"The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...."
"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."
"But newspapers have a duty to truth,' Van said.Lev clucked his tongue. 'They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.'Van got up from his chair to gather the cast-off newspapers. Lev took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. 'I don't mean to offend the journalists; they aren't any different from other people. They're merely the megaphones of the other people."
"The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism."
"The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second, is to find out who will tell you."
"To pick up the paper and read about yourself getting slammed, that doesn't start your day off right."
"It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism."
"If we're going to live as we are in a world of supply and demand, then journalists had better find a way to create a demand for good journalism."
"Where journalists have gotten themselves in trouble over the last few decades is that their skepticism often extends only to American officials, the U.S. military and Republican politicians."
Explore more quotes by Ryszard Kapuscinski
"In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this."
"The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed."
"In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust."
"Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination."
"In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated."
"I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another."
"This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession."
"There is a fundamental difference between the Polish experience of the state and the Russian experience. In the Polish experience, the state was always a foreign power. So, to hate the state was a patriotic act."
"Amin knew that neither West nor East would criticize him for fear that he would support the other side. He felt he was untouchable and he said so openly."
"He killed his enemies because he was afraid they would kill him. Amin ordered entire tribes to be put to death, because he feared they would rebel."
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