Walter Cronkite Quotes

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Walter Cronkite

Profession : Journalist

Birth : November 4, 1916

I think people make way too much of ratings.

Walter Cronkite

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

Walter Cronkite

I record it here today to establish my early predisposition to editorial work - to be both pontifical and wrong.

Walter Cronkite

I learned early on that in the real world, the masks of tragedy and comedy adorn the proscenium of every life.

Walter Cronkite

When I stepped down from the evening news at the age of 65, in '81, things were still going well. Immediately after that, the whole tenor of the CBS News Department changed.

Walter Cronkite

Under the Constitution, giving 'aid and comfort' to a wartime enemy can lead to a charge of treason.

Walter Cronkite

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

Walter Cronkite

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.

Walter Cronkite

I have never voted a party line. I vote on the individual and the issues.

Walter Cronkite

With all this dolling up and featuring of the news, it's getter harder and harder just to get the facts of the story.

Walter Cronkite

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.

Walter Cronkite

Beyond being timely, an obituary has a more subjective duty: to assess its subject's impact.

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.

Walter Cronkite

It's always hard, after you've been in command, to take a lesser role.

Walter Cronkite

I looked at the world with the humaneness, I think, which is one of the hallmarks of being liberal in my mind.

Walter Cronkite

We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law and the judicial system to bring the criminals to justice before they have the opportunity to build military forces that use these horrid weapons that rogue nations and movements can get hold of - germs and atomic weapons.

Walter Cronkite

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.

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.

Walter Cronkite

History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.

Walter Cronkite

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.

Walter Cronkite