Todd Gitlin Quotes

For years, I've been interviewed, and they write what they thought I thought or what they thought I said. Sometimes it's accurate, and often it isn't.

I'm the most misunderstood, misquoted person I know, honestly.

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

I've been misquoted a lot, and there's this tendency for people to put on to you how they think you should be or what they think you should feel.

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.

Scientifically speaking, if I say something, or it gets misquoted, or people put a spin on it... I mean, are you interested, really, in what people are saying?

I have often been characterized by one sound bite, and people say, 'That is the whole of Mike Huckabee, because we have him on this off-the-cuff moment.'

I rarely find that things put in quotes, attributed to me, are things that I said -certainly in the context in which they are presented.

It is an occupational hazard to be quoted out of context.

I stopped doing interviews for a long time because the words were mine, but they were in the wrong order. Context is a very important thing - a lot of the things I say aren't serious, and so to remove the laughter does me no favours.

People have often written about me, that I did this for this reason and that for that reason, and they're usually 98 percent wrong.

I've been really upset sometimes when I've been misquoted. And it's the one thing they use in big print. Or it's taken out of context. Thoughts are fluid and words are sticky. That's the thing.

A newspaperman said, 'You have to have a team in New York.' I replied, 'Who says you have to have a team in New York?' What came out in the papers was a headline that said, Giles Says, 'Who needs New York?' I confess that quote bothered me, and there seemed to be no way to dispose of it. It was repeated again and again.

It's really important to remember that most people in the public eye are human for a start and a lot of things that you read in the media get slightly misconstrued and manipulated.

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.

I don't have anything to hide but what happens is the media tend to beat up what I say.

I'm so used to being misunderstood.

I'm surprised sometimes at how some of my actions are misinterpreted.

I get labelled as just being about one thing, but there's lots of layers to what I do. It's just lazy journalism, but people start to accept it. If people spent an hour in my car driving around London and listening to the stuff I listen to, they'd hear some interesting stuff.

When people sometimes misquote me, I don't know if they understand what I'm saying.

Please pardon me for suggesting that if the papers, like yours, which heretofore have persistently garbled, and misrepresented what I have said, will now fully and fairly place it before their readers, there can be no further misunderstanding…

In my 20 years of baseball, I've been misquoted three or four times, and for someone who talks as much as I do, that's incredible.

There was an article about me once, and the first line was, 'It's good to be a gangster.' Well, I'm not a gangster. I'm an actor.

I've had my fair share of words being twisted and articles being sliced and diced.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.