Quotes by Alexander Cockburn

About Alexander Cockburn:

Alexander Claud Cockburn was an Irish American political journalist and writer. Cockburn was brought up by British parents in Ireland but had lived and worked in the United States since 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair, he edited the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also wrote the "Beat the Devil" column for The Nation as well as one for The Week in London, syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:

Alexander Cockburn

No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

Alexander Cockburn

Pose a political threat to Business As Usual, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, someone will try to kill you.

Alexander Cockburn

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Alexander Cockburn

Wear the badge of environmental radicalism, and you're a citizen automatically under suspicion.

Alexander Cockburn

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.

Alexander Cockburn

A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.

Alexander Cockburn

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

Alexander Cockburn

The weapon of the advocate is the sword of the soldier, not the dagger of the assassin.

Alexander Cockburn

Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.

Alexander Cockburn

By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security.

Alexander Cockburn

In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Alexander Cockburn

England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.

Alexander Cockburn

Regulation of sexual behavior is the preferred route to wider social control.

Alexander Cockburn

Republicans know well that a change of rhetorical pace is necessary. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their ...

Alexander Cockburn

Author Bio

  • NameAlexander Cockburn
  • DescriptionLeftist journalist and writer
  • BornJune 6, 1941
  • DiedJuly 21, 2012
  • ProfessionJournalist