Quotes from Joseph Pulitzer

I breakfast when I get up, lunch when I get the chance. If I never get it, I forget it. Sometimes I dine at seven, sometimes at midnight, sometimes not at all; and I never get to bed until four or five in the morning. Everything depends on the news; the hours make no difference to me.

We are a democracy, and there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its State, its national conduct, and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on.

I really think one of the most extraordinary things in the world is the amount of noise a child can make.

What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!

An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.

What I say is that there are not half a dozen papers in the United States which tamper with the news, which publish what they know to be false. But if I thought I had done no better than that, I would be ashamed to own a paper. You have to make everyone connected with the paper believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.

Newspapers should have no friends.

The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.