Words matter. These are the best Joseph Pulitzer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The American people want something terse, forcible, picturesque, striking – something that will arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy, arouse their indignation, stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, awaken their conscience.
I really think one of the most extraordinary things in the world is the amount of noise a child can make.
An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.
A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.
I breakfast when I get up, lunch when I get the chance. If I never get it, I forget it. Sometimes I dine at seven, sometimes at midnight, sometimes not at all; and I never get to bed until four or five in the morning. Everything depends on the news; the hours make no difference to me.
If a newspaper is to be of real service to the public, it must have a big circulation: first, because its news and its comments must reach the largest possible number of people; second, because circulation means advertising, and advertising means money, and money means independence.
Principles, convictions and motives are neither sold nor bargained for!
Publicity, publicity, publicity is the greatest moral factor and force in our public life.
I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day’s hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.
It only serves to show what sort of person a man must be who can’t even get testimonials. No, no; if a man brings references, it proves nothing; but if he can’t, it proves a great deal.
We are a democracy, and there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its State, its national conduct, and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on.
The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.
Performance is better than promise. Exuberant assurances are cheap.
It is to such men as Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson and Jackson and Franklin, all most lowly born, that we owe most of our greatness as a nation.
Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.
