I. F. Stone Quotes
1907–1989 United States
Isador Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989), better known as I. F.
- United States
- Activists
- Publishers
- Socialists
Also known as: Stone, I. F.
Random I. F. Stone quote
11 quotes
There’s a lot of things those journalists know, that I don’t know, but a lot of it is wrong.
I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.
Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda.
All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.
A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.
The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising.
The Haunted Fifties (1963)
What the world (and particularly the White House) needs to remember is that aggression is unleashed and escalated when one party to a dispute decides for itself who is guilty and how he is to be punished.
NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (2006)
There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.
The press, which dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the anti-war speeches of Morse and Gruening, ignored this one, too.
NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (2006)
The American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public.
NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (2006)
I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had called "the significant trifle" — the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation.
The Haunted Fifties (1963)