Tom Brokaw Quotes

Our obligation at the network is where do we fit into that and how can we best capitalize on that to make sure that our piece of that remains important to those young people.

Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.

When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns.

I hope the World War II generation doesn't lose that quality that made them so appealing: their modesty, and the way they are always looking forward and seldom back.

I'm not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science - and then learn to write.

Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Facts are your firewall against bias.

In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of $100 dollars a week because I didn't feel I could tell Meredith's doctor father I was making less.

It was the beginning of his personal crusade to make life easier for the more than forty million disabled Americans. By 1990 he had moved Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that mandated changes in public buildings, accommodations, and transportation to make it easier for the disabled to function in American society. For Dole, it was his greatest legislative victory. Yet it was also a classic example of the two sides of Bob Dole. Although he was a champion of this federal directive that imposed on states and businesses rigid requirements that were costly and, in some cases, little used, he was also known for advocating a reduced role for the federal government. On

Barack Obama's name will be the one on the peace prize, but his speech and his manner could become a gift for generations to come.

Cancer has given me a dose of humility. I'm much more empathetic. It's a club I would rather not have joined, but it is a club.

A big part of making your own luck is just charging out of the gate every morning.

After 50 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, my father died, too young, of a massive heart attack. He was 69. It's almost certain that all those years of nicotine inhalation were a major contributor to his clogged arteries.

The Fall of the House of Zeus is a riveting American saga of ambition, cunning, greed, corruption, high life and low life in the land of Faulkner and Grisham. These are good ol' boys gone bad with flair, private jets, and lots of cash to carry. Curtis Wilkie, a child of the South and a reporter's reporter, is the perfect match for this wild ride.

What I think is that Fox has done a very smart job of carving out their place.

Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.

Sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.

We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.

In one way or another, President Obama's critics will dog him all the way to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and even his admirers will continue to have doubts about his accomplishments if not his promise.

I'm a guy who's had great good fortune in his life. And everything has kind of gone in my direction.

People do not like to have their favorite myths of idols challenged and as a rule I think that the public does not like bad news.

The greatest rewards of Jerry Ford's time were reserved for his fellow Americans and the nation he loved.

walked everywhere. He hated getting rides.

I remain the luckiest guy I know.

I think people of my generation became journalists - you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers - because we wanted to report the big stories.

Came of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over

I guess the issue that I have with all the news organizations that have a political MO, if you will, attached to them is that they sometimes jump to conclusions about what this will mean. Get ahead of themselves.

My hope is that we would begin to have a dialogue in this country about the importance of civility. We can have strong differences, but it does seem to me that most of the country believes it's gone to critical mass in what I would call the professional class across the political spectrum - left and right.

These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome.

I have no problem whatsoever with a kind of political overview or an ideological overview for any of these outlets as long as it's transparent. We know where Breitbart stands, we know where Fox stands, where MSNBC stands. So, people go in with an understanding of that.

I don't like to play the macho card, but I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class culture.

The doctor didn't want me to play golf anymore and was worried about me fly-fishing. Golf is something I enjoy, but fly-fishing is a different thing: That's religion. Hunting is religion for me. I didn't want to give those up.

Forty years after the greatest scandal of the American presidency, Elizabeth Drew's account in Washington Journal remains fresh and riveting, instructive and evocative. Her afterword on Nixon's post-Watergate life is equally compelling.

You will not solve global climate change by hitting the delete button.

The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva's death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.

It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.

In the seasons of life, I have had more than my share of summers.

Peter will have a place in this brotherhood forever.

In Gerald Ford, the man he was in public, he was also that man in private.

I always think there are people looking not so much for information as for reassurance and reaffirmation of their views.

A common lament of the World War II generation is the absence today of personal responsibility

I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.

Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa's sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.

I was at MSNBC; I was constantly saying to them during Bridgegate, 'You've convicted Governor Christie without one iota of fact attaching him to the decision to stall the traffic on the bridge. Why don't we wait until the federal government or the state government ... completes its investigation.'

When the war ended, more than twelve million men and women put their uniforms aside and returned to civilian life. They went back to work at their old jobs or started small businesses; they became big-city cops and firemen; they finished their degrees or enrolled in college for the first time; they became schoolteachers,

What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.

It doesn't do any good to wire the world if we short circuit the soul.

Originally, the main purpose of the convention was to determine who the party would have as the presidential nominee and the vice-presidential nominee.

I like Washington a great deal. I enjoyed living there. But then I've enjoyed living almost everywhere I've ever been. I just find that it's a different menu wherever you go.

In your pursuit of your passions, always be young. In your relationship with others, always be grown-up.

Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now.

Oklahoma residents are known for not backing down from a fight in the political arena, on the gridiron, NBA courts or rodeo arenas, but in their reaction to the bombing, they knew intuitively they would not find restoration in rage.

The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.

I've interviewed presidents and royalty, rock stars and movie stars, famous generals and captains of industry; I've had front row seats at Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games; my books have been on best-seller lists, and my marriage is a long-running success.

Saving Italy is an astonishing account of a little known American effort to save Italy's vast store of priceless monuments and art during World War II. While American warriors were fighting the length of the country, other Americans were courageously working alongside to preserve the irreplaceable best of Italy's culture. Read it and be proud of those who were on their own front lines of a cruel war.

It's so much easier to do it right than to do it wrong.

What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.

You are not expected to know, but you are expected to wish to know.

I'm in remission. I need to get my physical conditioning to a higher level. I was always very fit. I need to get back to where I am very confident in my ability to bike a long way.

If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.

His life before the triumph that defined his legacy was a reminder of the importance of patience, courage, and the absence of self-pity.

We were empty nesters, our last-born child having departed for Duke. Meredith decided we needed a dog to fill the vacuum. She heard about a litter in Colorado sired by Chopper, the legendary avalanche dog at the top of Aspen Mountain.

It's not the questions that get us in trouble - it's the answers ...

I think they are paying a lot more attention to news now, by the way, in part because of national-security issues. A lot of young people have friends or family in the military today.

I think it's very much a matter between Barbara Walters and ABC.

No text message will ever replace the first kiss.

The D-Day fortieth-anniversary project awakened my earliest memories. Between the ages of three and five I lived on an Army base in western South Dakota and spent a good deal of my time outdoors in a tiny helmet, shooting stick guns at imaginary German and Japanese soldiers. My father, Red Brokaw, then in his early thirties, was an all-purpose Mr. Fix-It and operator of snow-plows and

One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children.

I had good care going. I had Meredith and the family. And I didn't want to become the object of some kind of pity, most of all. I didn't want to show up on the Internet, 'Tom Brokaw has cancer.'

There on the beaches of Normandy I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives were laced with the markings of greatness.

Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.

I was still in college when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out.

The response to 'The Greatest Generation' and the books that followed has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.

One of the advantages of being a national journalist of some recognition is that you come across high-profile people, and many become your friends.

During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.

Established a thriving medical practice and was a fixture at our high school sports games. He never spoke to any of us of the horrors he had seen. When one of his sons wore as a casual jacket one of Doc Auld's Army coats with the major's insignia still attached, I remember thinking,

I had four compression fractures in my spine. They were repaired, but it cost me two inches of height.

It is not enough to wire the world if you short-circuit the soul. Technology without heart is not enough.

ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF D-Day, I was broadcasting from the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, one of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The cemetery is at once haunting and beautiful, with 9,386 white marble headstones in long, even lines across the manicured fields of dark green, each headstone marking the death of a brave young American. The anniversary was a somber and celebratory

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.

It will do us little good to wire the world if we short circut our souls. There is no delete button for racism, poverty, or sectarian violence. No key stroke can ever clean the air, save a river, preserve a forest. This transformational new technology must be an extension of our hearts as well as of our mind.

Everywhere I go - from Main Street to Wall Street - people ask, 'What's happened to our political system? Why can't Washington folks work together?'

There has never been a military operation remotely approaching the scale and the complexity of D-Day. It involved 176,000 troops, more than 12,000 airplanes, almost 10,000 ships, boats, landing craft, frigates, sloops, and other special combat vessels
all involved in a surprise attack on the heavily fortified north coast of France, to secure a beachhead in the heart of enemy-held territory so that the march to Germany and victory could begin. It was daring, risky, confusing, bloody, and ultimately glorious [p.25]

I would say that we have not completely cracked the code of the '60s. We are still finding our way through that time.

I am simply the most conspicuous part of a large, thoroughly dedicated and professional staff that extends from just behind these cameras, across this country and around the world, in too many instances, in places of grave danger and personal hardship. They're family to me.

Is that cancer curable or just treatable.

Don't be afraid to do something unconventional, to take a chance, to risk something.

ABC wouldn't be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports.

What I think is highly inappropriate is what's going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS News that's quite outrageous.

You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world.

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.

What I did was experiment with a little marijuana like a lot of other people and walked away ...

I've lost seven friends to smoking-related lung cancer. Each death was a long, agonizing experience.

TV is a fickle business. I'm only good for the length of my contract.

One of the things that we don't want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we're going to own that country.

In Los Angeles, I had the good fortune of anchoring the news right before Johnny Carson came on, so to see him, the Hollywood stars watched me first.

The cancer is in remission, and I will shortly go on a drug maintenance regimen to keep it there.

There are more facts and more truths told in the first eight minutes of The Daily Show than most political news conferences in Washington.

Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.