Robert Krulwich Quotes

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.

If you want to be a poet, you can just write it on a napkin, and it's the length of the napkin, I guess. But usually you decide you'll rhyme it, or you'll have a formula. In radio, that's something called, 'Close your eyes and listen.'

So many people are not aware that NPR writes things, 'posts' things. But we are spreading the word.

A seed, after all, is an embryo, a potential plant waiting for its moment to grow. It has what it needs to begin. But it can also put itself on pause. It can wait.

I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

The safest place to be is always halfway into your future, without even knowing what it is.

I am fascinated by storytelling glue. Anytime I see someone who's good at it, I stop and wonder, 'How'd they 'do this? Why can't I tear myself away?

If you can ... fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was that got you to this school, don't let it go. Whatever kept you here, don't let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that what you and your friends have to say ... that the way you're saying it - is something new in the world.

If I were king of the world, babies born in airplanes, balloons and blimps would, instead of choosing to be German, Maldivian or American, all get special heavenly blue passports with a stork on the cover labeled 'Sky Baby' - and they'd be allowed to come and go anywhere they please.

Think about yourself.
You are here because...
Your dad met your mom.
Then your dad and mom conceived you.
So a particular egg in your mom
Joined a particular sperm from your dad
Which could only happen because not one of your direct ancestors, going all the way back to the beginning of life itself, died before passing on his or her genes...
So what are the chances of you happening?
Of you being here?

Author and blogger Dr. Ali Binazir did the calculations last spring and decided that the chances of anyone existing are one in 102,685,000. In other words, as this infographic figures it, you are totally improbable.

The more borders we have, the more quarrels, the more wars. That's one way to think about borders - they're trouble.

A loving and fierce defense of economics as a science.

What happens if you are the last (the very, very last) of your species, and you die - and humans notice? We live, increasingly, at a time when extinctions are recorded, remembered, and the last animal (or plant) in its line, by virtue of its being last, becomes a kind of celebrity. Its finality becomes a thing to honor.

There are some people who don't wait.

When you go to the theater, you are slipping out of your life into someone else's imaginary world.