Joseph Epstein Quotes

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.

The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.

If people want to criticize me because it sells papers, that's fine. I just don't like it when it's inaccurate.

A lot of people take shots at news channels.

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

It's a problem sometimes when you speak to journalists. They quote you, and then they read what they wrote, and then they even explain it. It's dangerous.

As a general rule, if you want to get at the truth - hear both sides and believe neither.

You find actually over the years that you get attributed with a lot of things you didn't do and you don't get reported on a lot of things you did do and I must say, when I read some of these things I wonder where the journalists get them from. They generally speak to somebody who's spoken to somebody who was down the back of a pub who heard the barman say, and gradually finds its way into magazines or articles but no, that's not the case.

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

I got kind of scared when I thought they wanted me to do something... I didn't want to be naked on the front of a magazine unless everybody would know it was a joke. I wouldn't want to be naked even then.

One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.

If it's controversy out there, or if it's some false stories out there, I want to clear it up. That's just what I'm all about.

I don't really do very well when I'm sent somewhere. A lot of magazines want to send you somewhere to do something. They want you to stow away on a ship, or something like that.

You have to tease enough misinformation and lack of information to hopefully make people want more.

When I started publishing, I got offers to write for big magazines. But I would always say, "Well, it's not that I don't want to write for these big magazines, but you can't edit it."

Nobody really likes to be lectured a lot. And, therefore, if you want to be an effective person, what you don't do is scold the person publicly all the time.

We don't want to confirm or deny the Holocaust. We oppose every type of crime against any people. But we want to know whether this crime actually took place or not.

I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are.

I want to be a person that isn't surrounded by their mail and their cat.

If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it's not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.

I know people are really interested in everything that the celebrities are doing, even if you don't consider yourself a "celebrity." What always would drive me crazy is - I took ethics classes in college - and it always amazes me how there would blatantly be something that I did not say in quotation marks. If you're putting quotation marks around it, it better be exactly what that person said.

I took ethics classes in college, and it always amazes me how they [tabloids] will blatantly say something that I did not say, in quotation marks. The first thing that we learned in ethics is that you better have it right. If you're putting quotation marks around something, it better be exactly what that person said.

If you really want the truth of anything, don't use Wikipedia.