John J. McLaughlin Quotes

There's a kind of journalistic narcissism that New York-based journalists are guilty of.

If you try to come off as this big-time star with an attitude, people don't like that.

Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.

Journalists are accused of being lapdogs when they don't ask the hard questions, but then accused of being rude when they do. Good thing we have tough hides.

Airs of importance are the credentials of impotence.

'The New York Times' is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.

For someone who’s made it clear that her life is superior to every other student’s at this school, you sure make it a habit of pursuing every facet of our boring, worthless lives.

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.

It's perfectly possible for somebody to make the transition from politics to journalism.

The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

A coxcomb is four-fifths affectation and one-fifth vanity.

We don't get paid to cheer lead for Donald Trump. We're just paid to cover him.

It is the small men and not the great who hold their noses in the air.

Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

A coxcomb is ugly all over with the effectation of a fine gentleman.

When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, 'I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,' Epictetus replied, 'I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!’.

We still write too many stories that are "state of the race" stories that are informed almost solely by what the polling shows and by what we're then deducing about who's up, who's down, and I'm just not sure that's very helpful to readers, it certainly doesn't elevate the debate and, and the problem is if you, if you cover these things, and I don't think the Times is particularly culpable, I think other news organizations are worse, if you cover them in an entirely "who's up, who's down" horse race way.

Among some people arrogance supplies the place of grandeur, inhumanity of decision, and roguery of intelligence.

A coxcomb begins by determining that his own profession is the first; and he finishes by deciding that he is the first of profession.

That politeness which we put on, in order to keep the assuming and the presumptuous at a proper distance will generally succeed. But it sometimes happens that these obtrusive characters are on such excellent terms with themselves that they put down this very politeness to the score of their own great merits and high pretensions, meeting the coldness of our reserve with a ridiculous condescension of familiarity, in order to set us at ease with ourselves.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.