A. J. Liebling Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.”

“If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.”

“A Louisiana politician can't afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department.”

“It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.”

“Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.”

“No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.”

“The pattern of a newspaperman's life is like the plot of 'Black Beauty.' Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.”

“The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.”

“A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.”

“The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.”