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I had an attack of the gout two days before pulling out, and I went limping off to the war instead of coming limping back from it.

A. J. Liebling

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A. J. Liebling
Age: 59 †
Born: 1904
Born: October 18
Died: 1963
Died: December 28
Journalist
War Correspondent
New York City
New York
AJ Liebling
A.J. Liebling
A.J Liebling
A J Liebling
Abbott Joseph Liebling
Days
War
Gout
Two
Limping
Back
Pulling
Attack
Instead
Coming
Went

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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.
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I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy
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There is a healthy American newspaper tradition of not taking yourself seriously It is the story you must take that way... And if you do take yourself seriously, according to this sound convention, you are supposed to do your best not to let anyone else know about it. (Like bed-wetting.)
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No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.
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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.
A. J. Liebling
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Forget that New Orleans is actually a little like the Combat Zone with French cooking, it still happens to be part of the great state of Louisiana where people play the political game the same way it's played in Lebanon. The place is one layer after another of tribes, factions and at least a million laughs.
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The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.
A. J. Liebling
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There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.
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The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.
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Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.
A. J. Liebling
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Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.
A. J. Liebling
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To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris.
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The country's present supply of foreign news depends largely on how best a number of dry goods merchants in New York think they can sell underwear.
A. J. Liebling
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If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.
A. J. Liebling
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Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.
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It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum.
A. J. Liebling
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Newspapers write about other newspapers with circumspection, ... about themselves with awe, and only after mature reflection.
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I met a keen observer who gave me a tip: 'If you run across a restaurant where you often see priests eating with priests, or sporting girls with sporting girls, you may be confident that it is good. Those are two classes of people who like to eat well and get their money's worth.'
A. J. Liebling
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The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.
A. J. Liebling
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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. J. Liebling