Quotes from A. J. Liebling

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

A boxer, like a writer, must stand alone.

Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon.

No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.

The pattern of a newspaperman's life is like the plot of 'Black Beauty.' Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

I can write faster than anybody who can write better, and I can write better than anybody who can write faster.

When I watch a fight, I like to study one boxer's problem, solve it, and then communicate my solution vocally.

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.

The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.

A city with one newspaper... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.

It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.

Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.

The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

My old friend looked at me with a new respect. He was discovering in me a capacity for hypocrisy that he had never credited me with before.

It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum.