Rupert Murdoch: his best quotes

"Yesterday Mr (Robert) Maxwell called me a moth-eaten kangaroo. I haven't got to that stage" – at shareholders' meeting in course of winning battle with Maxwell to own News of the World, 1969 "I want your resignation today" – sacks Times editor Harold Evans after several months of tension, 1982 (from Evans's My Paper Chase) "Fuck Dacre. Publish" – orders Sunday Times executives to go ahead with printing the (fake) Hitler Diaries in 1983, although told the historian Lord Dacre – asked to vet them and initially happy – now had doubts (from Robert Harris's Selling Hitler) "You fuckwit! You bastard! Get this fucking newspaper out!" – to Sunday Times executive on first night of printing at Wapping, 1986 (from Neil Chenoweth's Virtual Murdoch) "Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the values of the narrow elite which controls it" – MacTaggart lecture, 1989 "The guy [at a Pittsburgh bank] just said 'Give us the money'. We said 'we can't. We'd go out of business ... You're telling us to liquidate our company?' And he said 'yes'" – Murdoch looking back on the moment in News Corp's 1990/91 debt crisis when an obscure bank's initial refusal to roll its debt – only $10m of total liabilities of $3bn – threatened to trigger a global default (from William Shawcross's Murdoch: The Making of a Media Empire) "We won" – reaction while in Hollywood to news of John Major's unexpected election victory in 1992: a win by Neil Kinnock would have meant media ownership curbs (from the extensive Murdoch TV archive and commentary on Adam Curtis's blog, bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/) "The editor did it [Page 3] when I was away. It was so popular we left it there. That's the simple truth. Now it's getting a bit old-fashioned. One day it will come out" – interview in India, 1994 "Kill the book! Kill the fucking book!" – orders to HarperCollins USA boss on Chris Patten's book about China, 1998, according to Andrew Neil (although Murdoch has denied he said this) "What's MMR?" – drawled response after Sunday Times news executive gives lengthy account of the paper's top story of the year, demolishing an MMR/autism link, 2004 "He's a rock star. It's fantastic" – on Barack Obama, 2008, after his New York Post endorsed Obama in the Democratic primaries "[Obama] did make a very racist comment [after the arrest of a black academic] about blacks and whites and so on, which he said during the campaign he was above" – partially backs up Fox's Glenn Beck, who called Obama a racist, 2009 "Not much" – asked what he thought of David Cameron, 2006 "What does he really feel in his stomach? Is he going to be a new Thatcher, which is what this country needs?" – on Cameron, 2009 "This country has lost its sense of humour" – reported response to sacking of Andy Gray by Sky Sports, 2011