David Halberstam Quotes

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people.

Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it

Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the press, in this case the L.A. Times.

The most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable.

A staff can be no better than the man it serves.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.

The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.

There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

QUESTION: Do you know what the greatest test is? ANSWER:Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?

No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.

Always stay in with the outs.

Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions.

Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.

It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.

If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.

He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.

The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.

the ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter’s career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.

Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.

If he (George Keenan)felt on occasion more than a little uncomfortable when being listened to, then he was truly unhappy when not being listened to.

his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,

One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing t

He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.

Peterson thought it an unusual friendship, one only the Army could forge.

Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing

Do you know what the greatest test is? Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?

Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.

You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.

Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.

She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.

Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.

Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.

Education was central to reporting.

If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.

Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians,

Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.

Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence.

The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.

All professions have some element of theater to them.

He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.

When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.

It was the kind of country that made you feel better about yourself.