Bill Keller Quotes

Most recently, the President's reluctance to offend Senator Rick Santorum
a Catholic theocrat who believes that states should have the power to arrest gay lovers in their bedrooms, or even to criminalize couples who use contraceptives
was an occasion to wonder what, exactly, Mr. Bush was born-again into.

People crave trustworthy information about the world we live in. Some people want it because it is essential to the way they make a living. Some want it because they regard being well-informed as a condition of good citizenship. Some want it because they want something to exchange over dinner tables and water coolers.

I'm a Capricorn, actually.

I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.

Every technology, including the printing press, comes at some price.

One of the reasons that I'm a lurker on Twitter is that every time I tweet an idea, I feel like I'm delivering something to the competition that I ought to be giving to a reporter here.

Liberation movements - operating surreptitiously and conspiratorially - thrive on discipline and suspicion, and punish deviation or dissent.

A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Satan.

I'm convinced that the most important division in human affairs is probably not the one between left and right, liberal and conservative. It's the one between zealotry and understanding, between absolute conviction and compromise, between preachers and politicians.

I may be the old-media id, but I think I may be entitled to some credit for being a new-media pioneer.

In fact, I spent 25 years as a reporter, swearing I would never become an editor. Sitting at a desk, watching other people go out and find the story, and then fussing with other people's words - I just didn't get the appeal of that.

One of the most important disciplines in journalism is to challenge your working premises.

For all of the woes besetting our business, I believe with all my heart that newspapers - whether they are distributed to your doorstep, your laptop, your iPhone or a chip implanted in your cerebral cortex - will be around for a long time.

Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it's also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has on several occasions talked about transparency as an absolute principle. I don't personally believe that.

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.

There is a long history of newspapers being doomed. They were doomed by radio. They were doomed by television. They were probably doomed by the telegraph way back when.

I don't think anyone at Fox believes they are producing even-handed, impartial coverage.

My feeling about the Internet or anything else is that the more it tends to become a cult, the more I want to call it into question.

There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.

Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company's announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.

Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from ... from ... wait, what was I saying?

There's no question that sources sometimes have interests aside from the truth when they talk to reporters. That's why reporters have to very aggressively report against their own theses and against their initial information.

I think there's a misconception that I'm opposed to social media.

Since September 11 2001, editors in America have faced some excruciating choices, as the attempt to wage a war against a new kind of enemy sometimes strained the boundaries of our laws and values.

It's a considerable source of tragedy in the world that people stay in powerful jobs long past the point where they're a spent force.

Twitter and Facebook are brilliant tools, the journalistic uses of which are still being plumbed. They are great for disseminating interesting material. They are useful for gathering information, including from places that are inaccessible.

Choosing my favorite moment in journalism would be like picking a favorite among my children. I can't pick one favorite.

I have nothing against conservative people putting out conservative commentary or doing conservative broadcasting, or liberal people doing liberal broadcasting, or conservative blogs or liberal blogs.