Walter Cronkite
We all have our likes and our dislikes. But... when we're doing news - when we're doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we're doing the daily news, covering politics - it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.Collection: Politics
All through my life, I have never disguised my sentiments about politics in general.Collection: Politics
It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace.Collection: Government
A liberal to me is one who - and it suits some of the dictionary definitions - is unbeholden to any specific belief or party or group or person, but makes up his or her mind on the basis of the facts and the presentation of those facts at the time. That defines what I am.Collection: Time
Part of the new morality of the '60s and '70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability.Collection: Attitude
Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.Collection: Work
Arianna Huffington has exercised her renowned wisdom to give journalism another boost along the ever busier Internet. Her blog site promises to be an interesting challenge for those of us lucky enough to be invited to participate with our occasional contributions.Collection: Wisdom
The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.Collection: Death
America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.Collection: Health
We the people have the strength to bring our country from our weak-kneed stumbling gait in the last ranks of reason to the leadership of the great march to environmental victory.Collection: Environmental
In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.Collection: Truth
If every small nation with a border dispute believes they can go ahead and launch a pre-emptive war and that it will be approved by the greatest power, that is a very dangerous thing.Collection: War
I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.Collection: War
I don't think it's in any way harmful, this marriage of media and politicians. I think it enhances the communications process considerably and makes it possible for the public to be far more aware, far more up-to-date on issues and the opposite sides of the issues.Collection: Marriage
I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since.Collection: Birthday
I do think that the success, although still not complete... in the recognition of equal rights... to all Americans, regardless of color, creed and so forth, was also one of the best stories we've had to report.Collection: Success
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.Collection: Freedom
A journalist covering politics, most of us are aware of the necessity to try to be sure we're unbiased in our reporting. That's one of the fundamentals of good journalism.Collection: Politics
And that's the way it is.
We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.
I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got.
I learned early on that in the real world, the masks of tragedy and comedy adorn the proscenium of every life.
Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.
Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.
I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst.
The perils of duck hunting are great - especially for the duck.
I had as much time to prepare for that moon landing as NASA did, and I still was speechless when it happened. It just was so awe-inspiring to actually be able to see the thing through the television that was a miracle in itself.
I think cameras ought to be everywhere the reporters are allowed to go. I think, furthermore, reporters and cameras ought to be everywhere that the Constitution says the public can go.
I had discovered journalism to be my life's ambition.
I'm a liberal, but I'm not biased. Seriously.
We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law and the judicial system to bring the criminals to justice before they have the opportunity to build military forces that use these horrid weapons that rogue nations and movements can get hold of - germs and atomic weapons.
When I stepped down from the evening news at the age of 65, in '81, things were still going well. Immediately after that, the whole tenor of the CBS News Department changed.
I do not consider a liberal necessarily to be a leftist.
The great sadness of my life is that I never achieved the hour newscast, which would not have been twice as good as the half-hour newscast, but many times as good.
The successful landing on the moon, very probably, is the best story.
Helping set the day's agenda and deciding what we used and editing it, that was a journalistic high point. I liked reporting as well. Just doing the news - the live performance - wasn't important. Working on the desk was.
I can swear on a stack of Bibles that not once in doing the 'CBS Evening News' for 19 years - well, I take it back. Once perhaps. But during 19 years, with perhaps one exception, was I ever aware of any political or commercial pressure on that broadcast whatsoever.
Perhaps if all the peoples of the world understand what war really means, we would eliminate it.
I am joining the hundreds of thousands who shall be marching in the Virtual March on Washington to Stop Global Warming in order to demonstrate the concern that we all hold for the future of our planet and all the living things - flora, fauna, human and animal - that exist upon it.
Beyond being timely, an obituary has a more subjective duty: to assess its subject's impact.
Maybe I'm just a slow learner or something, but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible.
I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.
I hope that, somewhere, Mom and Dad are proud that little Walter is performing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
I wanted to have more time to play and reflect, but I find retirement more stressful than having a nice, steady job because I have to make decisions about where I want to be.
Anchormen shouldn't cry.
I simply told people what I thought about the state of the war in Vietnam, and it was that we better get out of this.
I think that our comfort is in our history.
I don't believe in these headline-hunting interviews. That's just not my style.
I think people make way too much of ratings.
History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.