Quotes from Harold Evans

I think America has a brilliant future.

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.

Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

When I first came to the United States in 1956 I fell in love with things - mainly the vitality and the freedoms.

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.

Nothing is so tiring to the reader as excavating nuggets of meaning from mountains of words.

Adjectives not susceptible to modifiers are: certain, complete, devoid, empty, entire, essential, everlasting, excellent, external, fatal, final, fundamental, harmless, ideal, immaculate, immortal, impossible, incessant, indestructible, infinite, invaluable, invulnerable, main, omnipotent, perfect, principal, pure, round, simultaneous, square, ultimate, unanimous, unendurable, unique, unspeakable, untouchable, whole, worthless.

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

I would have written something shorter, but I didn't have time.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

Speechwriter Barton Swaim cheerfully explains why the opaque may be a virtue. "Using vague, slippery or just meaningless language," he writes, "is not the same as lying: it's not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others, or just to sound like you're saying something instead of nothing.

Prepositional verbs grow like toadstools. Once there was credit in facing a problem. Now problems have to be faced up to. The prepositions add nothing of significance.

Orwell, of course: Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Fog in the U.S. Supreme Court, where five judges in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010) sanctified secret bribery as freedom of speech.

The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.

Sir William Haley, one of my predecessors as editor of the Times, said, "There are things which are bad and false and ugly and no amount of specious casuistry will make them good or true or beautiful.

Governments may know a lot more about our lives than we care to contemplate, but frequently they know less about the world than we presume.

Government just cannot govern well without reliable independent reporting and criticism. No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by free competitive reporting; the cleverest agents of the secret police state are inferior to the plodding reporter of the democracy.

Picasso has been many times quoted as saying good artists copy, great artists steal.