I've got a 12-year-old grandson who, when he was 3 years old, before he could say many other words, could name the different kinds of dinosaurs.
I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.
Sometimes a famous subject may even outlive his own obituary writer.
I feel no compulsion to be a pundit. As a matter of fact, I really don't have that much to say about most things. Working with hard news satisfies me completely.
Watergate just happened to come along at the same time as the demand for honesty in relations between the sexes, in advertising, in ecology, in almost everything. It just stumbled into that great big elephant trap that had already been built for it.
I think that our comfort is in our history.
With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.
Part of the new morality of the '60s and '70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability.
It's a little hard not to be an elitist when you're making millions of dollars a year.
I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst.
I've gone from the most trusted man in America to one of the most debated.
I do think that the success, although still not complete... in the recognition of equal rights... to all Americans, regardless of color, creed and so forth, was also one of the best stories we've had to report.
It's hard for us to really understand the immensity so far of the conquest of space.
We all have our likes and our dislikes. But... when we're doing news - when we're doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we're doing the daily news, covering politics - it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.
It's always hard, after you've been in command, to take a lesser role.
I learned early on that in the real world, the masks of tragedy and comedy adorn the proscenium of every life.
There's no story that breaks, including a five-alarm fire in Brooklyn, that I don't wish I were covering.
I think it'd be great if the evening news broadcast, for instance, were unsponsored and unrated.
I worry that we're not getting enough of the news that we need to make informed judgments as citizens.
I had as much time to prepare for that moon landing as NASA did, and I still was speechless when it happened. It just was so awe-inspiring to actually be able to see the thing through the television that was a miracle in itself.
I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.
I looked at the world with the humaneness, I think, which is one of the hallmarks of being liberal in my mind.
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.
With all this dolling up and featuring of the news, it's getter harder and harder just to get the facts of the story.
The military people don't like it; the government probably doesn't like it, but the people should know what they're sending their young people into when they permit their governments to declare war and engage in war.
The very first time a politician puts you in his target is sometimes a disappointment, because perhaps you thought you were friends and getting along well... But it is not something that you dwelled on. At least, I did not.
All through my life, I have never disguised my sentiments about politics in general.
In the early stages of our involvement in Vietnam, basically I felt that our course was right. My concern grew with the concern of the American people.
The whole period of the '60s changed a lot of us; there was never a decade like that in American history... to have the decade capture one of the great accomplishments of this century: man landing on the moon.
Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.
I can swear on a stack of Bibles that not once in doing the 'CBS Evening News' for 19 years - well, I take it back. Once perhaps. But during 19 years, with perhaps one exception, was I ever aware of any political or commercial pressure on that broadcast whatsoever.
The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.
I'm a liberal, but I'm not biased. Seriously.
I don't believe in these headline-hunting interviews. That's just not my style.
There were a few youthful fishing trips, but I never enjoyed the experiences, partly because I didn't like hurting the bait.
I wouldn't give up on the U.N. yet.
Under the Constitution, giving 'aid and comfort' to a wartime enemy can lead to a charge of treason.
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.
I had discovered journalism to be my life's ambition.
We have overcome some terrible blows to our democracy, to the future of our democracy, to the future of our nation. We survived the Civil War and the strife that tore this nation apart.
Helping set the day's agenda and deciding what we used and editing it, that was a journalistic high point. I liked reporting as well. Just doing the news - the live performance - wasn't important. Working on the desk was.
I think cameras ought to be everywhere the reporters are allowed to go. I think, furthermore, reporters and cameras ought to be everywhere that the Constitution says the public can go.
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.
When you're bringing in a fairly unknown candidate challenging a sitting president, the population needs a lot more information than reduced coverage provides.
We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.
Court proceedings, except for certain limited situations, are open to the public. This is for the protection of the accused, to be certain to ascertain that there is a fair trial.
I record it here today to establish my early predisposition to editorial work - to be both pontifical and wrong.
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.
You think you would react one way when a situation develops and, and when the sharp shells are flying, you don't quite stand up like you think you might.
