26 Quotes by Nick Davies

Good newspapers believe in giving a balanced view of the world. Fine. Some people then exploit that belief and use it to balance truth with falsehood.

Over and again, you allow the hard logic of the market to usurp human choice and so you create a society with the morality of an anthill, where all human life is reduced to labour, all freedom flattened by the demand for efficient production, all weakness punished, all violence justified, where schools and hospitals are cut while crime and alienation flourish and millions are thrown into the deep pit of unemployment.

One of the guests at this wedding, who has been close to her for years, says that here in Oxfordshire, Rebekah [Brooks] is a country wife... but that, in London, where the real transactions take place, she is 'the beating heart of the Devil'.

It is a rule of life in the power elite that there is no such thing as a purely social act.

The rules are clear. We will be asking for the money back.

In a film muddied by fictional detail, the new Spielberg production Fifth Estate's portrayal of the Guardian's work with Wikileaks is accurate in describing the running dispute between journalists who wanted to redact documents to make them safe and Julian Assange, who wanted no such restraint.

Back in the 1980s, the 'News of the World' had specialised in digging into the privacy of criminals. In the 1990s, enriched by the excavation of Princess Diana's volatile life, they had widened their work to mine the activities of any celebrity, any public figure.

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.

I've learnt that your life is more interesting and fulfilling when you don't lead it in a straight line and you go off on zigzags. I've made it a rule that if life becomes too comfortable and easy, I'll disrupt it.