Tom Brokaw Quotes

I think people of my generation became journalists – you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers – because we wanted to report the big stories.

Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was, and he didn’t require consultants or gurus to change him.

Peter will have a place in this brotherhood forever.

ABC wouldn’t be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports.

I played high school basketball at six feet, then I went to 5-11 in my 50’s, and then, bang, I went down to 5-9.

You will not get a Google alert when you fall in love.

John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of a single moment.

Originally, the main purpose of the convention was to determine who the party would have as the presidential nominee and the vice-presidential nominee.

I think obviously we need to work harder at extending the women’s movement. How do women who have prepared for careers and have a child get back to the workplace and still fulfill maternal roles?

Everywhere I go – from Main Street to Wall Street – people ask, ‘What’s happened to our political system? Why can’t Washington folks work together?’

The doctor didn’t want me to play golf anymore and was worried about me fly-fishing. Golf is something I enjoy, but fly-fishing is a different thing: That’s religion. Hunting is religion for me. I didn’t want to give those up.

I was on the board of the Mayo Clinic. I was diagnosed there, and I could pick up the phone and get a hold of whoever I wanted to. What I learned is that you really have to get proactive and manage your case.

In the seasons of life, I have had more than my share of summers.

I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.

I’ve interviewed presidents and royalty, rock stars and movie stars, famous generals and captains of industry; I’ve had front row seats at Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games; my books have been on best-seller lists, and my marriage is a long-running success.

We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.

Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.

In 1989, a lone and still-anonymous Chinese student stood unarmed in front of a Chinese tank and gave the world an enduring image of the determination of China’s young to change their nation. He didn’t text message the tank or share a video on YouTube.

I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.

In our family, where we began with no money, we like to say that we have discovered that God invented money so those who have it can help others.

In Los Angeles, I had the good fortune of anchoring the news right before Johnny Carson came on, so to see him, the Hollywood stars watched me first.

The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything – meals, jobs, clothing.

What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.

We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda’s attacks on America launched the nation into three wars – against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.

1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.

When he entered the Oval Office – by fate, not by design – Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?

Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa’s sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.

My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

I’m a guy who’s had great good fortune in his life. And everything has kind of gone in my direction.

What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.

I’m not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science – and then learn to write.

The cancer is in remission, and I will shortly go on a drug maintenance regimen to keep it there.

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.

One of the advantages of being a national journalist of some recognition is that you come across high-profile people, and many become your friends.

After 50 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, my father died, too young, of a massive heart attack. He was 69. It’s almost certain that all those years of nicotine inhalation were a major contributor to his clogged arteries.

Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck.

In your pursuit of your passions, always be young. In your relationship with others, always be grown-up. Set a standard, and stay faithful to it.

I had four compression fractures in my spine. They were repaired, but it cost me two inches of height.

I don’t like to play the macho card, but I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class culture.

There are lots of dimensions to being a cancer patient. The overwhelming one is that it takes over your life.

I was still in college when ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out.

Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.

We were empty nesters, our last-born child having departed for Duke. Meredith decided we needed a dog to fill the vacuum. She heard about a litter in Colorado sired by Chopper, the legendary avalanche dog at the top of Aspen Mountain.

I am simply the most conspicuous part of a large, thoroughly dedicated and professional staff that extends from just behind these cameras, across this country and around the world, in too many instances, in places of grave danger and personal hardship. They’re family to me.

I’ve been lucky from my earliest memory on. I happened to be born to the right parents, and the lives we led – working class, migratory – suited my personality. I had an adventurous mindset, and we lived on an Army base, then in South Dakota – it was a dynamic environment.

I was a young man working in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1960s when I received a call, and I was summoned to Atlanta to work at WSB. It was, for me, the beginning of a real education about the South.

I had gone to all the big stories of the ’80s, which was one of the most fertile times in American journalism, around the world and here as well.

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

I’m a working journalist. I’m interested in all points of view, and I draw conclusions based on facts, not just on opinions.

I’ve seen a lot of seasons, change in my time. It’s been a very lucky life.

I have no problem whatsoever with a kind of political overview or an ideological overview for any of these outlets as long as it’s transparent. We know where Breitbart stands, we know where Fox stands, where MSNBC stands. So, people go in with an understanding of that.

I’m not going to sit on the porch of the old anchorman’s home with a drool cup.

Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.

If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.

Judy Miller is the most innocent person in this case. I really thought that was outrageous that she was jailed and we needed as journalists to draw a line in the sand in a strong but thoughtful way.

When you walk into a doctor’s office, you’ve got to have the same attitude you would about anything else. You’ve got to ask tough questions, and you’ve got to not be afraid to challenge their credentials.

It’s all storytelling, you know. That’s what journalism is all about.

The response to ‘The Greatest Generation’ and the books that followed has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.

The greatest rewards of Jerry Ford’s time were reserved for his fellow Americans and the nation he loved.

The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva’s death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s.

I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I’d say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.

I’m the father of three daughters, and they’re all highly trained professionals. Two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point.

My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.

When I read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I was so struck by the universality of small towns.

Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years – from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 – women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.

One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children.

What I think is that Fox has done a very smart job of carving out their place.

TV is a fickle business. I’m only good for the length of my contract.

Barack Obama’s name will be the one on the peace prize, but his speech and his manner could become a gift for generations to come.

Cancer has given me a dose of humility. I’m much more empathetic. It’s a club I would rather not have joined, but it is a club.

I’m in remission. I need to get my physical conditioning to a higher level. I was always very fit. I need to get back to where I am very confident in my ability to bike a long way.

I would say that we have not completely cracked the code of the ’60s. We are still finding our way through that time.

What I think is highly inappropriate is what’s going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS News that’s quite outrageous.