“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard!” — William Lloyd Garrison (1805 – 1879) *

“My mother, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a quitter.’ I have heard her say that all my life. Now, lying  in bed, coming awake in the dark, I feel the fury of her energy fighting the good-for-nothing idler within me who wants to go back to sleep instead of tackling the brave new day.” — Russell Baker (1925 – 2019) **

“I am a survivor from the golden age of journalism…. There were no televised panels of ‘experts’ and journalists on cable TV who began to answer every question with the two deadliest words in the media world — ‘I think.’ We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered nonstop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.” — Seymour M. Hersh (b. 1937) ***

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* Massachusetts-based abolitionist and journalist, founder of The Liberator

** Reporter and longtime columnist for The New York Times. Passage is the first paragraph of his second memoir, The Good Times (1989).

*** Investigative reporter for Dispatch News Service, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The London Review of Books. Passage is from the first page of his memoir, Reporter (2018).