79 Inspiring Media Quotes

In a world where information is at our fingertips and media serves as a lens through which we view the world, quotes from thought leaders, creatives, and critics can profoundly influence our understanding and perspective. Words have the power to inspire change, challenge norms, and motivate us to think more deeply about the messages we encounter every day. In this carefully curated collection of 79 Inspiring Media Quotes, you'll find insights and reflections that span the spectrum of the media landscape. Each quote is a testament to the impact and importance of media in shaping our thoughts, behaviors, and societies. Whether you're seeking inspiration, a new viewpoint, or simply a moment of reflection, these quotes offer invaluable wisdom and the potential to spark meaningful conversations. Join us as we delve into the profound world of media through the powerful words of those who understand its true essence.

1. “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."[Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America; Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, February 26, 1962]” - John F. Kennedy

2. “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” - Joseph Stalin

3. “Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.” - Alfred Hitchcock

4. “Give me lust, baby.Flash.Give me malice.Flash.Give me detached existentialist ennui.Flash.Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.Flash.” - Chuck Palahniuk

5. “The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.” - Al Franken

6. “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 Said

7. “Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.” - Edward R. Murrow

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

9. “If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?” - Warren Ellis

10. “Dein Wissen hat keine Bedeutung, wenn niemand anderes weiß, dass du weißt.” - Persius

11. “[D]ie Leute [lesen] nichts, was sie nicht interessiert, und wenn sie etwas interessier[t], [sind] sie auch reif dafür.” - Isabel Allende

12. “Was wir über unsere Gesellschaft, ja über die Welt, in der wir leben, wissen, wissen wir durch die Massenmedien” - Niklas Luhmann

13. “Von der Pressefreiheit hängt praktisch jede andere Freiheit ab.” - Salvador de Madariaga

14. “Das Web 2.0 bedeutet vor allem, dass die soziale Reichweite des Einzelnen größer ist als die Reichweite der eigenen Stimme.” - Sascha Lobo

15. “If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.” - Wes Nisker

16. “The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?” - Clay Shirky

17. “Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.” - Clay Shirky

18. “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” - Cory Doctorow

19. “Books are better than television, the internet, or the computer for educating and maintaining freedom.Books matter because they state ideas and then attempt to thoroughly prove them. They have an advantage precisely because they slow down the process, allowing the reader to internalize, respond, react and transform. The ideas in books matter because time is taken to establish truth, and because the reader must take the time to consider each idea and either accept it or, if he rejects it, to think through sound reasons for doing so. A nation of people who write and read is a nation with the attention span to earn an education and free society if they choose.” - Oliver DeMille

20. “[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)” - Jess C. Scott

21. “It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.” - John Pilger

22. “Our stable and eternal verities are being challenged. There's a kind of postmodern breakdown in journalism. The breadth of information sources and the speed of transmission are growing; but the traditional gravity of news has eroded. -Jin Yongquan ” - Judy Polumbaum

23. “I think that of all the principles for journalism, the most important is to complicate simple things and simplify complicated things. At first sight, you may think something is simple, but it may conceal a great deal. However, facing a very complex thing, you should find out its essence. -Jin Yongquan” - Judy Polumbaum

24. “I would tell young journalists to be brave and go against the tide. When everyone else is relying on the internet, you should not; when nobody's walking, you should walk; when few people are reading profound books, you should read. ... rather than seeking a plusher life you should pursue some hardship. Eat simple food. When everyone's going for quick results, pursue things of lasting value. Don't follow the crowd; go in the opposite direction. If others are fast, be slow. -- Jin Yongquan” - Judy Polumbaum

25. “I used to think the most important thing for a reporter was to be where the news is and be the first to know. Now I feel a reporter should be able to effect change. Your reporting should move people and motivate people to change the world. Maybe this is too idealistic. Young people who want to be journalists must, first, study and, second, recognize that they should never be the heroes of the story. ..A journalist must be curious, and must be humble. --Zhou Yijun” - Judy Polumbaum

26. “By focusing exclusively on the events of the day, journalism all but severs the connection between time and eternity. It makes the world appear to be nothing but an endless jumble of events through which it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern anything beyond the relatively base motivations of lust, calculated self-interest, and the will to power. In short, journalism is not able to communicate wisdom.” - Craig M. Gay

27. “Attempts to thwart or muzzle the media continued as well. At a conservative caucus meeting in Charlottetown in August 2007, journalists assembled in the lobby of the hotel, as they usually do at such gatherings, to talk to caucus members as they passed by. The [Prime Minister's Office] communications team, however, was not prepared to allow it. Taking their cue, or so it appeared, from a police state, they had the RCMP remove the reporters from the hotel.” - Lawrence Martin

28. “The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.” - Paul Krugman

29. “I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news ... if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.” - Frank Zappa

30. “The media—stenographers to power.” - Amy Goodman

31. “We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly.” - John Pilger

32. “The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.” - Ray Bradbury

33. “People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.” - Karl Lagerfeld

34. “Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.” - Finley Peter Dunne

35. “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 Wallace

36. “The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.” - Timothy Leary

37. “This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.” - Walter Kirn

38. “I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please."The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere."I'm working on it.” - Andrew Sullivan

39. “As the wall between advertising and content erodes, the aptitude required to understand the functions and design of media content becomes more complex.” - Matthew P. McAllister

40. “The captains of England and Australia can barely exchange pleasantries these days without a body-language expert immediately declaiming on the angle of their handshakes.” - Lawrence Booth

41. “My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.” - Diane Setterfield

42. “Acknowledgements! My thanks to HollywoodWhen you showed me John RamboStitching up his arm with no anaestheticAnd giving them “a war they won’t believe”I knew then my calling, the job for meThanks also to the recruitment advertsFor showing me soldiers whizzing around on skisAnd for sending sergeants to our schoolTo tell us of the laughs, the great food, the payThe camaraderieI am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debtYou paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimageOne year basking in the Garden of Eden(I haven’t quite left yet)Thanks to Mum and thanks to DadFuck it,Thanks to every parentFlushing with pride for their brave young ladsBuying young siblings toy guns and toy tanksWaiting at the airportWaving their flags” - Danny Martin

43. “He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls or characters, but pretty girls with fat asses and nice tits.” - Jess C. Scott

44. “The ordinary public is a puppet of worthless news and media.” - Santosh Kalwar

45. “For how many generations now had his people been turning their backs on things? How long had they sat in their living rooms and watched other people die?” - Clare B. Dunkle

46. “The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.” - Margaret Atwood

47. “متهمون نحن بالإرهابأذا كتبنا عن بقايا وطن ...مخلع ... مفكك مهترئأشلاؤه تناثرت أشلاء ...عن وطن يبحث عن عنوانه ...وأمة ليس لها سماء !!***عن وطن ... يمنعنا ان نشتريالجريدةأو نسمع الأنباء ...عن وطن ... كل العصافير بهممنوعة دوما من الغناء ...عن وطن ...كتابه تعودوا أن يكتبوامن شدة الرعب ...على الهواء !!” - نزار قباني

48. “Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why /but the editorialists forget it /terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.” - John Berger

49. “Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.” - John Berger

50. “A free press doesn't mean it's not a tame press.” - Andrew Vachss

51. “I always said I'm just an instrument; I'm transparent, like a medium, the language passes through me. Which is a bit like saying I'm a recording device, I start and I go. I had a real connection to ongoing, language production in real time.” - Constance Dejong

52. “Mogo living brings about true freedom. When you have the inner conviction to do the most good and the least harm, you are free to say no to media, social, and peer pressures. You are free from a nagging sense that your life does not have value or meaning. You are free to imagine and then create a truly successful (in the deepest meaning on the word) life. You are free to be at peace with yourself and all those whom your life touches.” - Zoe Weil

53. “Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence, though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.” - Criss Jami

54. “When it comes to world news, attitude is what marks the distinction between justice and vengeance. Justice is pure, but vengeance brings more ruin.” - Criss Jami

55. “Having a hearing is educational. Having a hearing with television cameras is useful. Having a hearing with two rows of television cameras is Heaven.” - Tim Wirth

56. “The news isn't there to tell you what happened. It's there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear.” - Joss Whedon

57. “The mass depiction of the modern woman as a "beauty" is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, "beauty" is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way "beauty" so directly contradicts women's real situation.” - Naomi Wolf

58. “Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.” - Paul Haggis

59. “If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.” - Chris Hedges

60. “In 1994, the average person spent $79 on books as compared to $56 on recorded music.” - Richard L. Brandt

61. “The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.” - George Orwell

62. “In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.” - Nicolás Gómez Dávila

63. “There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.” - Christopher Hitchens

64. “The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.” - Charles Moore

65. “The COUNTRY is controlled by LAWS>LAWS are controlled by POLITICIANS>POLITICIANS are controlled by VOTERS>VOTERS are controlled by PUBLIC OPINION>PUBLIC OPINION is controlled by the MEDIA (News, Hollywood, Internet...) & EDUCATIONso. whoever controls MEDIA & EDUCATION, controls the COUNTRY.” - William J Federer

66. “When did fact checking and journalism go their separate ways?” - Jon Stewart

67. “Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it.” - Hanne Blank

68. “Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.” - Neil Postman

69. “Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art” - Dan Rather

70. “In their eyes, Eve saw the wolf gleam. The story was the prey, ratings the trophy.” - J.D. Robb

71. “I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” - Carl Sagan

72. “The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.” - Alain De Botton

73. “People are tired of this mainstream shit; television and radio is ghastly and the public can smell the corporate meeting. When you watch a show with Simon Cowell, you know no human touch has been near it, that they've carefully engineered the outcome and picked those they're going to humiliate. We live in an age of information glut, but so many people don't question what they're spoon-fed or bother to search for themselves.” - Greg Proops

74. “Once someone tries a real extra virgin -- an adult or a child, anybody with taste buds -- they'll never go back to the fake kind. It's distinctive, complex, the freshest thing you've ever eaten. It makes you realize how rotten the other stuff is, literally rotten. But there has to be a first time. Somehow we have to get those first drops of real extra virgin oil into their mouths, to break them free from the habituation to bad oil, and from the brainwashing of advertising. There has to be some good oil left in the world for people to taste.” - Tom Mueller

75. “It should be apparent that the belief in objectivity in journalism, as in other professions, is not just a claim about what kind of knowledge is reliable. It is also a moral philosophy, a declaration of what kind of thinking one should engage in, in making moral decisions. It is, moreover, a political commitment, for it provides a guide to what groups one should acknowledge as relevant audiences for judging one's own thoughts and acts.” - Michael Schudson

76. “Yet, the main issue is not the shaping of the minds by explicit messages in the media, but the absence of a given content in the media.” - Manuel Castells

77. “Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army.So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it?The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers.With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later.Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction.The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th” - Timothy Wu

78. “Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients’ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. “In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members.” - Randy Noblitt

79. “If there is a media in a country which deceives its own people, that country needs no other enemy!” - Mehmet Murat ildan