New York Times Quotes

“People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.”
― Pico Iyer

“And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.’ This rather shallow piece appeared in the New York Times magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of Partisan Review, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, The Waste Land, Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The drift to the right, the rediscovery of patriotism, the gruesome maturity of the once iconoclastic Norman Podhoretz, okay, okay! I have one question which Atlas in his much-ballyhooed article did not even discuss. The old gang may have had regrettable flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged ‘neo-conservative’ movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary and the New Criterion can be found in unforced alliance with openly obscurantist, fundamentalist and above all anti-intellectual forces. In the old days, there would at least have been a debate on the proprieties of such a united front, with many fine distinctions made and brave attitudes struck. As I write, nearness to power seems the only excuse, and the subject is changed as soon it is raised. I wait for the agonised, self-justifying neo-conservative essay about necessary and contingent alliances. Do I linger in vain?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

“Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unnecessary.

Another widely publicized hoax-- one to which the President of the United States added his sub-hoax-- was a 1996 story appearing in USA Today under the headline, 'Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of the Past.' There was, according to USA Today, 'an epidemic of church burning,' targeting black churches. Like the gang-rape hoaxes, this story spread rapidly through the media. The Chicago Tribune referred to 'an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson' leaving black churches in ruins.

As with the gang-rape hoaxes, comments on the church fire stories went beyond those who were supposed to have set these fires to blame forces at work in society at large. Jesse Jackson was quoted was quoted in the New York Times as calling these arsons part of a 'cultural conspiracy' against blacks, which 'reflected the heightened racial tensions in the south that have been exacerbated by the assault on affirmative action and the populist oratory of Republican politicians like Pat Buchanan.' Time magazine writer Jack White likewise blamed 'the coded phrases' of Republican leaders for 'encouraging the arsonists.' Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today said that the fires were 'an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.' New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, "The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the last century.'

As with the gang-rape hoaxes, the charges publicized were taken as reflecting on the whole society, not just those supposedly involved in what was widely presumed to be arson, rather than fires that break out for a variety of other reasons. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam said that society in effect was 'giving these arsonists permission to commit these horrible crimes.' The climax of these comments came when President Bill Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said that these church burnings recalled similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was a boy. There were more that 2,000 media stories done on the subject after the President's address.

This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black. However, retractions of the original story-- where there were retractions at all-- typically were given far less prominence than the original banner headlines and heated editorial comments.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“The Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s….ten years from now, the phrase “information economy” will sound silly. (1997)”
― Paul Krugman

“Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what's at stake isn't a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.”
― Lewis H. Lapham

“Never Sell Yourself Short.”
― Chris Mentillo, The Unhappy Heiress

“The New York Times must write from the position of highest authority, like the voice of an overlord and colonial master, which it cannot if the matter is discussed on foreign terms.”
― Thorsten J. Pattberg

“Our Western press soldiers from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, etc. (often 1 correspondent for every 200 million Chinese), happily manufacture stories, demonize the Chinese government, and fabricate heroes, saviors, and incidents for China, at will.”
― Thorsten J. Pattberg

“In a story on the U.S.-brokered security pact between the government of Sudan and southern rebel groups, the New York Times referred to the war in Sudan as "a pet cause of many American religious conservatives." It is hard to imagine the Times describing the plight of Soviet Jewry as a "pet cause" of American Jews, or opposition to apartheid as a "pet cause" of African-Americans.”
― Paul Marshall, Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion

“Jes looked toward the house. Nice back porch. Perfect for Saturday morning brunch and the New York Times in matching spa robes. No thanks. Just the sex, please.”
― Cynthia Robinson, Birds of Wonder

“What happened in New York and Washington and abroad seemed to impinge not at all upon the Sacramento min. I remember being taken to call upon a very old woman, a rancher's widow, who was reminiscing (the favored conversational mode in Sacramento) about the son of some contemporaries of hers. 'That Johnston boy never did amount to much,' she said. Desultorily, my mother protested: Alva Johnston, she said, had won the Pulitzer Prize, when he was working for The New York Times. Our hostess looked at us impassively. 'He never amounted to anything in Sacramento,' she said.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I, Lisa K Friedman, being of sound mind and broken foot...”
― Lisa K Friedman

“A Horrific Discovery in a Park Turns Bizarre: It Was a Doll, Not a Baby”
― Corey Kilgannon and Ashley Southall

“Haven’t we learned lessons? Maybe “real men” should forget about going to Tehran and try multilateral diplomacy.”
― Nicholas Kristoff

“Look out.”
― Nicholas Kristoff

“She's an Assad TOADY!..... Joe: What does that mean?... Joe: before we say that about her, we should probably read it...”
― Bari Weiss

“When the first settlers arrived in America nobody knew who was White and who was wrong. No Natives had ever seen a firearm before, or had a clue who could be the good guy with the gun.”
― Péter Zilahy

“anybody worth a shit gets fired from those places.”
― Jimmy Dore

“Amazingly, the NYT included the fact that Thomas had recanted her story but, in a classic agit-prop style that typified the media assault on Trump, they saved the recantation for one sentence buried near the end of the article.”
― Charles Moscowitz, Toward Fascist America: 2021: The Year that Launched American Fascism

“All my English teachers talked about the importance of finding "your voice." It always confused me because I knew we all had so many voices, so many audiences, and my teachers seemed only to really want the kind of voice that sat with its legs crossed, reading The New York Times.”
― Kiese Laymon, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“You often hear people say the news is full of lies. But most of the time that’s not exactly right. Much of what you see on television or read in The New York Times is in fact true in the literal sense, But that doesn’t make it true. It’s not true. At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie. A lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind. Facts have been withheld on purpose along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated.”
― Tucker Carlson

“The saving grace of The New York Times is that it is The New York Times.”
― Jayson Blair, Burning Down My Masters' House: My Life at the New York Times

“The Times is a deeply flawed organization and when it stood on its own, without the scrutiny of blogs and media critics, its own voice could drown out the critics. The reality now is that much of the journalism produced at The Times, while among the best in the nation, does not hold up to the mythical status—an ideal that is nurtured by Times management—that is given to it by many of its readers.”
― Jayson Blair, Burning Down My Masters' House: My Life at the New York Times