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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Walter Cronkite Quotes

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.

– Walter Cronkite

The perils of duck hunting are great – especially for the duck.

– Walter Cronkite

For heaven’s sakes, in the newspaper days, when we had competing newspapers, and the newsstands sale was as important as the circulation – as the agreed-upon circulation, whatever you call that – in those days, why, gosh, the sensationalism was tremendous.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

I record it here today to establish my early predisposition to editorial work – to be both pontifical and wrong.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

I learned early on that in the real world, the masks of tragedy and comedy adorn the proscenium of every life.

– Walter Cronkite

With all this dolling up and featuring of the news, it’s getter harder and harder just to get the facts of the story.

– Walter Cronkite

I think people make way too much of ratings.

– Walter Cronkite

Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day – 23 minutes – and that’s supposed to be enough.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

The very first time a politician puts you in his target is sometimes a disappointment, because perhaps you thought you were friends and getting along well… But it is not something that you dwelled on. At least, I did not.

– Walter Cronkite

Court proceedings, except for certain limited situations, are open to the public. This is for the protection of the accused, to be certain to ascertain that there is a fair trial.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– 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.

– Walter Cronkite

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

– Walter Cronkite

I had discovered journalism to be my life’s ambition.

– Walter Cronkite

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

I feel no compulsion to be a pundit. As a matter of fact, I really don’t have that much to say about most things. Working with hard news satisfies me completely.

– Walter Cronkite

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.

– Walter Cronkite

I wouldn’t give up on the U.N. yet.

– Walter Cronkite

I haven’t quite got the hang of this retirement thing.

– Walter Cronkite

Under the Constitution, giving ‘aid and comfort’ to a wartime enemy can lead to a charge of treason.

– Walter Cronkite

We have more and more one-newspaper towns, and that troubles me.

– Walter Cronkite

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