Walter Cronkite Quotes (38 Quotes)

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.

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

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.

Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.

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.

When Moses was alive, the pyramids were a thousand years old . . . . Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy . . . . Here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity.

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.

Dan Rather and I just aren't especially chummy.

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

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

We are keeping company, as the old phrase used to be. I'm not making any moves immediately. I don't think it's proper. My wife has only been gone less than a year. I'll wait until that year has passed, at least.

Well thank you very much, I didn't expect birthday greetings from outer space.

America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.

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

This opens the door on another chapter of history.

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.

They're going to have to eat their words. Some of the things I've seen her do on Today when there's breaking news, I thought she's done a fine job. ... Her own journalistic instincts come to the fore.

I remember her when she was an NBC reporter -- correspondent in Japan -- and I thought she did great work. I haven't watched their morning show that much in late years, but from what I remember then, I can't see how she would lose her ability to be a journalist.

I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got.

It's my belief that we should get out now.

I don't think those things live forever with the public. They're more likely to live with us journalists than the public itself.

Errol Flynn died on a 70-foot boat with a 17-year-old girl. Walter has always wanted to go that way, but he's going to have to settle for a 17-footer with a 70-year-old.

The great sadness of my life is that I never achieved the hour newscast, which would not have been twice as good as the half-hour newscast, but many times as good.

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.

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

The earliest admonition we had about the computer was to quit using the phrase electric brain. The folks in Philadelphia tried to convince us that the Univac didn't have a brain, and that whatever we fed into it would determine what we got out of it.

And that's the way it is.

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

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion....It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

Old anchormen, you see, don't fade away. They just keep coming back for more. And that's the way it is, Friday, March 6, 1981.

There's a little more ego involved in these jobs than people might realize.

There's a difference between that and showboating. There's definitely some showboating. Usually it's obvious, to us journalists anyway -- whether it's obvious to the public, I don't know.

The Best of the CBS Evening News.

gave the impression of playing a role more than simply trying to deliver the news to the audience.

I think he's terrific. I've always had a great appreciation of his ability. And I would rather like to see him stay on the job there.

Congress the Presidency in the Television Age.

When you're bringing in a fairly unknown candidate challenging a sitting president, the population needs a lot more information than reduced coverage provides.