Bill Keller

“I'm a Capricorn, actually.”

“The curse of a journalist is that he always has more questions than answers.”

“I don't think fairness means that you give equal time to every point of view no matter how marginal. You weigh the sides, you do some truth-testing, you apply judgment to them.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“My dad was an engineer, and he became the CEO of Chevron. His was an engineer's mind-set: Everything's kind of a problem; how do you approach the problem?”

“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.”

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

“Beating up on the so-called elite media has a nice populist ring to it.”

“The Democrats generally recoil from the subject of entitlements.”

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

“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.”

“Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.”

“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.”

“If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand; one out of three Americans believe we have had Visitors and, hey, who knows? But I would certainly want to ask a few questions.”

“You don't want to go around willy-nilly suing news organizations. That's probably self-defeating.”

“I don't think that there is absolute freedom of the press. We operate under laws - against libel, for instance. The idea that there is some absolute press freedom is kind of a myth.”

“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.”

“My view of social media is that it is a set of tools, not a religion.”