Rupert Murdoch Quotes
Media Mogul
I think everyone's against abortion.
The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.
I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father, mother, children - is fundamental to our civilisation.
At its core, a fair and just society is one where opportunity is open to all - not just those at the top.
I think a newspaper should be provocative, stir 'em up, but you can't do that on television. It's just not on.
I don't mind what people say about me. I've never read a book about myself.
The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks.
In motivating people, you've got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example - and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.
I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
No one's going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.
People who watch 'Fox News,' you may say, and this is anecdotal, but they are passionate about it. In the most unlikely places, like down in Soho where I used to live, people would come up to me and thank me for it. People I didn't know from a bar of soap. People appreciate that at least they're being heard. It is much more watchable.
Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.
CNN is pretty consistently on the left, if you look at their choice of stories, what they play up. It's not what they say. It's what they highlight.
My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it.
No leader will fight for values, for principles, if their government is a value-free vacuum. Moral relativism is morally wrong.
I would like to be remembered, if I am remembered at all, as being a catalyst for change in the world, change for good.
I'm not looking for a legacy, and you'll never shut up the critics. I've been around 50 years. When you're a catalyst for change, you make enemies - and I'm proud of the ones I've got.
You can't have a free democracy if you don't have a free media that can provide vital and independent information to the people.
You can't have a competitive, egalitarian meritocracy if only some of your citizens have the opportunity for a good education.
When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.
I now wear a Jawbone. This is a bracelet that keeps track of how I sleep, move and eat - transmitting that information to the cloud. It allows me to track and maintain my health much better.
I try to keep in touch with the details... I also look at the product daily. That doesn't mean you interfere, but it's important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what's happening.
Bury your mistakes.
Online advertising is increasingly only a fraction of what is being lost from print advertising, and it is under constant pressure.
There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there's just millions of voices and people want to be heard.
I feel that people I trusted - I don't know who, on what level - have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it's for them to pay. And I think, frankly, that I'm the best person to see it through.
Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can't be too worried about what they're told at their country clubs.
From the beginning on, newspapers have prospered for one reason: giving readers the news that they want.
I'm not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian.
Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
It's a libel to say that I use my newspapers to support my other business interests. The fact is, I haven't got any other business interests.
Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.
Crony capitalism is not capitalism - it is cronyism.
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.
I'm a permanently curious person. I probably waste my time being curious about things that have got nothing to do with the business sometimes. What keeps me alive, certainly, is curiosity.
We all know growth is absolutely vital to a free society. No one should want Australia to be a stag-nation: a nation with a stagnant economy and stagnant aspirations.
The cold, commercial word 'market' disguises its human character - a market is a collection of our aspirations, exertions, choices and desires.
You can't build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.
We've got to lift our game tremendously. We'll sell our business news and information in print, we'll sell it to anyone who's got a cable system, and we'll sell it on the Web.
People begin to resent the rich only when they conclude that the system is rigged.
I felt that it's best just to be as transparent as possible.
I'm a catalyst for change. You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.
I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother's father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.
In my life, I have learned that most people want the same thing. They are not driven by class resentment. What they want most is to make a better life for themselves and their families - and to know that the opportunities for their children will be better than they were for themselves.
It's been a long career, and I've made some mistakes along the way.
Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.
In a world as competitive as ours, the child who does not get a decent education is condemned to the fringes of society. I think all Australians agree that this is intolerable. So we must demand as much of our schools as we do of our sports teams - and ensure that they keep the Australian dream alive for every child.
So long as I can stay mentally alert - inquiring, curious - I want to keep going. I love my wife and my children, but I don't want to sit around at home with them. We go on safaris and things like that. I can do that for a couple of weeks a year. I'm just not ready to stop, to die.
As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world.
I am amazed that CNN can't get its act together.
One thing I resent is the slur that I just support political candidates because of the business.
Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?
Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.
When you're a catalyst for change, you make enemies - and I'm proud of the ones I've got.
I think you have a danger of regulating, putting regulations in place which will mean there will be no press in 10 years to regulate.
My father left me with a clear sense that the media was something different.
We certainly employ a lot of immigrants at Fox... and we do not take any consistent anti-immigrant line.
I can go into restaurants and a whole table will get up and clap if they recognize me, because they love Fox News. Other places - or even the same place - people will turn the other way.
The UK desperately needs less government and freer markets.
Money is not the motivating force. It's nice to have money, but I don't live high. What I enjoy is running the business.
I was brought up in a publishing home, a newspaper man's home, and was excited by that, I suppose. I saw that life at close range and, after the age of ten or twelve, never really considered any other.
Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary.
Satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.
If you're in the media, particularly newspapers, you are in the thick of all the interesting things that are going on in a community, and I can't imagine any other life that one would want to dedicate oneself to.
Now if you look at the London 'Times,' you'll find that with quite a number of the photographs, you touch them, and they turn into videos. I think newspapers come alive that way. We talk about 'papers.' We should cut out the word 'paper,' you know? It's 'news organizations.'
I've operated and launched newspapers all over the world.
Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here, and there will always be a little bit of it.
I'm not ashamed of any of my papers at all and I'm rather sick of snobs that tell us that they're bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants. I doubt if they read many papers at all.
My mother just died at 103, so that's a start. You should live 20 years longer than your parents.
Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall. That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet.
We started Fox when everyone said it couldn't be done.
Thankfully, Australia has emerged from its inauspicious colonial beginnings to become a proud nation, a nation that overcame those primeval prejudices.
I wasn't weaned on the web nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives.
The digital native doesn't send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online and starts a blog.
I was born in Australia and am proud of my Australian provenance, but I am now an American. Like so many naturalized citizens, I felt that I was an American before I formally became one.
What's just about a generation of people who rack up government debt for their own health care and retirement - while leaving their children and grandchildren to foot the bill?
At News Corporation, we have a history of challenging media orthodoxies.
The press is the only institution that is truly accountable. The founding fathers put the First Amendment first for a reason.
A lot of people are very happy to read their newspaper either on their iPad or - startlingly and faster and faster the figures go up - on their telephone, on their smart phone.
The CNN international is a different service - it is even more leftist and anti-American than CNN is. That's their business, that's fine, but it can't be getting any revenue. There is no cable network that I know of anywhere in the world other than in America that pays them for their products.
If the sea level rises 6 inches, that's a big deal... we can't mitigate that; we can't stop it. We've just got to stop building vast houses on seashores and go back a little bit.
ESPN is a very, very good operation, and it's a gold mine. It's an even bigger gold mine than Fox News.
People are playing games on their TV, young men are, and people are shopping... they are not watching their news channels, but they are using their TVs for other things.
I believe people will be watching their TV screens for a long time and that TV channels have a long-term life.