With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.
— Walter Cronkite
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.
Under the Constitution, giving 'aid and comfort' to a wartime enemy can lead to a charge of treason.
Perhaps if all the peoples of the world understand what war really means, we would eliminate it.
The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programmes have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings.
I think there are a lot of good pieces that can be covered in 20 minutes that don't need an hour, but by the same token, there are things that need an hour or more.
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 never took any elocution lessons, no diction lessons. I might have been a pretty decent broadcaster if I had, but what you see, I'm afraid, is what you get.
I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.
I had discovered journalism to be my life's ambition.
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.
Give news a little more time, and don't request that they also, in their news time, entertain. We're not entertainers. We're journalists. And we need more time to do our job well.
I think we are realizing that we are going to have to have an international rule of law.
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 learned early on that in the real world, the masks of tragedy and comedy adorn the proscenium of every life.
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.
Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.
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.
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.
I've got a 12-year-old grandson who, when he was 3 years old, before he could say many other words, could name the different kinds of dinosaurs.
The military people don't like it; the government probably doesn't like it, but the people should know what they're sending their young people into when they permit their governments to declare war and engage in war.
I record it here today to establish my early predisposition to editorial work - to be both pontifical and wrong.
The successful landing on the moon, very probably, is the best story.
In the early stages of our involvement in Vietnam, basically I felt that our course was right. My concern grew with the concern of the American people.
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.
We have more and more one-newspaper towns, and that troubles me.
With all this dolling up and featuring of the news, it's getter harder and harder just to get the facts of the story.
I haven't quite got the hang of this retirement thing.
I wouldn't give up on the U.N. yet.
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.
There were a few youthful fishing trips, but I never enjoyed the experiences, partly because I didn't like hurting the bait.
Grandfather was an old-fashioned pharmacist who never ceased venting his resentment at the growing number of retail items the drugstore had to carry, and he would go into periods of fearful rage when the subject of chain stores was raised.
I think somebody ought to do a survey as to how many great, important men have quit to spend time with their families who spent any more time with their family.
The perils of duck hunting are great - especially for the duck.
As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.
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.
No, I don't think my generation got into this dinosaur thing.
Cable has come along; many all-news 24 hour cable outlets in the United States. They have cut deeply into the traditional networks' viewing audience.
I think it'd be great if the evening news broadcast, for instance, were unsponsored and unrated.
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.
Anchormen shouldn't cry.
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.
Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.
I worry that we're not getting enough of the news that we need to make informed judgments as citizens.
I hope that, somewhere, Mom and Dad are proud that little Walter is performing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
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.
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.
I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.
If, as they say, the threat of the hangman's noose has a powerful way of focusing one's attention, the same can be said of pregnancy.
We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.
