I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.
BEN BRADLEEIn the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!
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In the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”
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The first rough draft of history.
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To hell with news! I’m no longer interested in news. I’m interested in causes. We don’t print the truth. We don’t pretend to print the truth. We print what people tell us. It’s up to the public to decide what’s true.
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It changes your life, the pursuit of truth.
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It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.
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Our best today; better tomorrow.
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It’s very hard to stand up to the government which is saying that publication will threaten national security. People don’t seem to realize that reporters and editors know something about national security and care deeply about it.
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I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
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You never monkey with the truth.
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It changes your life, the pursuit of truth, if you know that you have tried to find the truth and gone past the first apparent truth towards the real truth. It’s very, it’s very exciting.
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Nothing’s riding on this, except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys f-k up again, I’m gonna get mad.
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More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.
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So, here you are, especially in the Pentagon. Some guy tells you something. He says that’s a national security matter. Well, you’re supposed to tremble and get scared and it never, almost never means the security of the national government.
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Maybe some of today’s papers have too many ‘feel-good’ features, but there is a lot of good news out there.
BEN BRADLEE






