Top 40 Rupert Murdoch Quotes

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

I’m a permanently curious person. I probably waste my time being curious about things that have got nothing to do with the business sometimes. What keeps me alive, certainly, is curiosity.

So long as I can stay mentally alert – inquiring, curious – I want to keep going. I love my wife and my children, but I don’t want to sit around at home with them. We go on safaris and things like that. I can do that for a couple of weeks a year. I’m just not ready to stop, to die.

I’m not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.

When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.

Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint’s obituary.

I am amazed that CNN can’t get its act together.

In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.

I was brought up in a publishing home, a newspaper man’s home, and was excited by that, I suppose. I saw that life at close range and, after the age of ten or twelve, never really considered any other.

We certainly employ a lot of immigrants at Fox… and we do not take any consistent anti-immigrant line.

Online advertising is increasingly only a fraction of what is being lost from print advertising, and it is under constant pressure.

The CNN international is a different service – it is even more leftist and anti-American than CNN is. That’s their business, that’s fine, but it can’t be getting any revenue. There is no cable network that I know of anywhere in the world other than in America that pays them for their products.

It’s a libel to say that I use my newspapers to support my other business interests. The fact is, I haven’t got any other business interests.

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.

When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.

Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here, and there will always be a little bit of it.

I don’t mind what people say about me. I’ve never read a book about myself.

I think everyone’s against abortion.

I’m not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian.

If you’re in the media, particularly newspapers, you are in the thick of all the interesting things that are going on in a community, and I can’t imagine any other life that one would want to dedicate oneself to.

My worry about the New York Times is that it’s got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we’d love to challenge it.

I’ve operated and launched newspapers all over the world.

I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.

Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.

As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world.

Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.

In a world as competitive as ours, the child who does not get a decent education is condemned to the fringes of society. I think all Australians agree that this is intolerable. So we must demand as much of our schools as we do of our sports teams – and ensure that they keep the Australian dream alive for every child.

I’m not ashamed of any of my papers at all and I’m rather sick of snobs that tell us that they’re bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants. I doubt if they read many papers at all.

I felt that it’s best just to be as transparent as possible.

We’ve got to lift our game tremendously. We’ll sell our business news and information in print, we’ll sell it to anyone who’s got a cable system, and we’ll sell it on the Web.

I think you have a danger of regulating, putting regulations in place which will mean there will be no press in 10 years to regulate.

I’m a strange mixture of my mother’s curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother’s father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

At its core, a fair and just society is one where opportunity is open to all – not just those at the top.

Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall. That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet.

I feel that people I trusted – I don’t know who, on what level – have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay. And I think, frankly, that I’m the best person to see it through.

I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.

I can go into restaurants and a whole table will get up and clap if they recognize me, because they love Fox News. Other places – or even the same place – people will turn the other way.

The UK desperately needs less government and freer markets.

No one’s going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.