Best 101 quotes of Walter Cronkite on MyQuotes

Walter Cronkite

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    Walter Cronkite

    A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power.And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.

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    Walter Cronkite

    And that's the way it is.

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    Walter Cronkite

    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.

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    Walter Cronkite

    A system of world order-preferably a system of world government -is mandatory... The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty.

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    Walter Cronkite

    Attorney General John Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as the Torquemada of American law. Tomás de Torquemada...was largely responsible for...[the] torture and the burning of heretics — Muslims in particular. Now, of course, I am not accusing the Attorney General of pulling out anyone's fingernails or burning people at the stake (at least I don't know of any such cases). But one does get the sense these days that the old Spaniard's spirit is comfortably at home in Ashcroft's Department of Justice.

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    Walter Cronkite

    Be kind to an old man.

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    Walter Cronkite

    Ethics must be reintroduced to public service to restore people's faith in government. Without such faith, democracy cannot flourish. Your ambitious agenda is filling a desperate need.

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    Walter Cronkite

    Everybody knows that there's a liberal, that there's a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents.....Anybody who has to live with the people, who covers police stations, covers county courts, brought up that way, has to have a degree of humanity that people who do not have that exposure don't have, and some people interpret that to be liberal. It's not a liberal, it's humanitarian and that's a vastly different thing.

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    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.

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    Walter Cronkite

    For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

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    Walter Cronkite

    For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience. Now, however, my circumstances are different. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.

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    Walter Cronkite

    For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience.

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    Walter Cronkite

    For nearly five decades the World Federalists have worked to promote a strengthened UN and more effective institutions of global governance. I offer my personal endorsement. Now a great opportunity has opened for the realization of the dreams of the UN's founders.

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    Walter Cronkite

    Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I am dumbfounded that there hasn't been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I am neither Republican nor Democrat. I am a registered independent because I find that I cast my votes not on the basis of party loyalty but on the issues of the moment and my assessment of the candidates.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I am not a contemplative type, basically. I am much more of an action person and, as a consequence, I look forward to today and tomorrow and what's breaking.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I asked [my doctors] if I'd be able to play singles tennis and they said I could. That made me very happy since I haven't played in five years.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I'd like to be a song and dance man.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I don't think people ought to believe only one news medium. They ought to read and they ought to go to opinion journals and all the rest of it. I think it's terribly important that this be taught in the public schools, because otherwise, we're gonna get to a situation because of economic pressures and other things where television's all you've got left. And that would be disastrous. We can't cover the news in a half-hour event evening. That's ridiculous.

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    Walter Cronkite

    If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism - that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.

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    Walter Cronkite

    If we are to avoid that catastrophe [a nuclear World War III], a system of world order — preferably a system of world government — is mandatory. The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty, just as America's thirteen colonies did two centuries ago. When we finally come to our senses and establish a world executive and parliament of nations, thanks to the Nuremburg precedent we will already have in place the fundamentals for the third branch of government, the judiciary.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I grew my mustache when I was nineteen in order to look older. I never shaved it off even though it overran its usefulness many, many years ago. Once you get started in television, people associate you with your physical appearance - and that includes the mustache. So I can't shave it off now. If I did, I'd have to answer too much mail.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I guess I showed certain signs of being a workaholic in early years; I had a magazine route very early on - I must have been about seven or eight years old or something like that - when I was carrying Liberty magazine, trying to win green and brown coupons; I eventually [won] a pony.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I'm a romanticist in many ways. I never get behind the wheel of my boat and dropping the anchor without saying to myself, secretly giving my orders to the crew "All right, lift the anchor, we're on our way to South Hampton. We're gonna beat them there with this load of tea!

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    Walter Cronkite

    I'm still ready to go to the moon, if they'll take me.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I'm very proud of what Harry Truman turned out to be in office and the record he made. Certainly I think he'll go down in history as one of the greats, because of his conscience, his determination to stick with what he knew was right.

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    Walter Cronkite

    In all my years as a news commentator I was never once, able to tell the truth, about anything.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I never had the ambition to be something. I had the ambition to do something.

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    Walter Cronkite

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

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    Walter Cronkite

    Interviewing friends is a tough one. Your duty to the interview must transcend your friendship. Occasionally you'll lose a friend.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I sort of think in a way that many of us young reporters who had the opportunity to go overseas for our organizations were kind of, in a sense, war profiteers. We were enhancing our careers while covering that terrible conflict.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I think he [composer Joe Raposo] was the first man who kissed me on the cheek.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists.

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    Walter Cronkite

    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. Probably less.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I think that being liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, noncomitted to a cause but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it's a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen.

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    Walter Cronkite

    It is a seldom proffered argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing.

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    Walter Cronkite

    It is clear that military force and our policy of preemption are alone insufficient to make us safe. But help is on the way. Legislation has been proposed to create a US Department of Peace. In the propsed Department of Peace it would organize our present system into one conscious effort to improve humanity in achieving peace, where true safety lies.

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    Walter Cronkite

    It is not the reporter's job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts.

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    Walter Cronkite

    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. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order.

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    Walter Cronkite

    It seems to me that instead of cutting taxes, we ought to be increasing the taxes to pay off the deficit, rather than let that thing build up to the point where our grandchildren's grandchildren are going to be paying for our period of time and our years at the helm.

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    Walter Cronkite

    It seems to rise again when the crisis times come, and this is a time of most severe crisis, as we all know, not just for the history of the United States and the survival indeed of our democracy, but for the future peace of the world. And never before probably has the need for interfaith commitment been nearly as great as it is at this very moment.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I've gone from the most trusted man in America to one of the most debated.

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    Walter Cronkite

    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.

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    Walter Cronkite

    I was lucky enough to have one of the first high school classes in the country.

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    Walter Cronkite

    Justice was born outside the home and a long way from it; and it has never been adopted there

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    Walter Cronkite

    Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible.

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    Walter Cronkite

    Let us hear the peal of a new international liberty bell that calls us all to the creation of a system of enforceable world law in which the universal desire for peace can place its hope and prayers.