Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

• Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.
• In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
• Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
• Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.
• Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.
• An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.
• Anything that isn't opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn't matter.
• Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.
• There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.
• The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.