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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

You never monkey with the truth.

Ben Bradlee

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  I do worry about how newspapers respond to falling circulation figures. I’m not sure that the answer is for newspapers to try to cater to whatever seems to be the fad of the day.

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  Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.

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  Those [Watergate] tapes are going to take me to my grave with a huge smile on my face.

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  Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they’re lazy, and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.

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  Everybody who talks to a newspaper has a motive. That’s just a given. And good reporters always, repeat always, probe to find out what that motive is.

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  As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.

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• 

  Generals who can write always make me nervous.

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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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• 

  I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.

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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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  The first rough draft of history.

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• 

  National security is a really big problem for journalists, because no journalist worth his salt wants to endanger the national security, but the law talks about anyone who endangers the security of the United States is going to go to jail.

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• 

  The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

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  As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.

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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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