“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”

“(aspiring journalist to Carl Kolchak)'Andy knows I want to be a reporter. Like you'This took me by surprise. 'Sallie, my dear, nobody wants to be a reporter like me.”

“I love this book. When other U.S. reporters were licking Ken Lay's loafers, Leopold went for Enron's thieving throat. Leopold is a journalist who insists on real investigative reporting–inside documents, inside sources, hard knife-in-the-gut evidence–detective-style reporting that is just about illegal in the U.S.A. Bravo and my personal Pulitzer to Jason Leopold. Every journalist in America should read this, then quit or riot.”

“His story and the detailed nature of his belief system make me suspect that he is suffering from paranoid ideas. I love that: I'm suspicious that Mr. Hill is suspicious. It makes me think of those now yellowing crime-fighting signs from ten or fifteen years earlier that say: Report suspicious people.Suspicious people report suspicious people. Suspicious people report suspicious people report suspicious people.Add paranoia, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

“Money should never change one’s values…. Making money is only a report card. It’s a way to tell how you’re doing.”

“As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.”