Quote

The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.

Jimmy Breslin

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Jimmy Breslin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: October 17
Died: 2017
Died: March 19
Journalist
Jamaica
Queens
James Earle Breslin
Thing
Spit
Office
Nobody
Democracy
Politics
Whether
Half
President
Royalty

More quotes by Jimmy Breslin

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Journalism schools are good to get a job, but I don't know what else they are good for. I don't like the word journalism to begin with. It's news reporting, and that consists of using your two feet. The only lesson, then, that you could give people is how to climb stairs, because there are no stories on the first floor.
Jimmy Breslin
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I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.
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When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.
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Marvelous Marv was holding down first base. This is like saying Willie Sutton works at your bank.
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I'm on my high school football team and MUST show how much I know.
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What you want to do is not go to work. You're not missing a thing. The worst thing I did was start work young.
Jimmy Breslin
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Those of Manhattan are the brokers on Wall Street and they talk of people who went to the same colleges those from Queens are margin clerks in the back offices and they speak of friends who live in the same neighborhood.
Jimmy Breslin
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Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.
Jimmy Breslin
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True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.
Jimmy Breslin
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I think it would be very good if writers and artists take a stand in electoral politics. They've got the ability to put words together that might reach the ears of the people of the city who vote.
Jimmy Breslin
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Baseball isn't statistics, it's Joe DiMaggio rounding second base.
Jimmy Breslin
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Media, the plural of mediocrity.
Jimmy Breslin
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The auditorium, named after a dead Queens politician is windowless in honor of the secrecy in which he lived and, probably, the bank vaults he frequented.
Jimmy Breslin
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Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.
Jimmy Breslin
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If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.
Jimmy Breslin
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Men in the uniform of Wall Street retirement: black Chesterfield coat, rimless glasses and the Times folded to the obituary page.
Jimmy Breslin
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I busted out of the place in a hurry and went to a saloon and drank beer and said that for the rest of my life I'd never take a job in a place where you couldn't throw cigarette butts on the floor. I was hooked on this writing for newspapers and magazines.
Jimmy Breslin
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All political power is primarily an illusion. Illusion. Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors, first a thin veil of blue smoke, then a thick cloud that suddenly dissolves into wisps of blue smoke, the mirrors catching it all, bouncing it back and forth.
Jimmy Breslin
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Rage is ... This is Breslin's full quote: Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers
Jimmy Breslin
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The other feature is a gymnasium named after another dead politician who was gifted with fast and extremely sure hands.
Jimmy Breslin