I don’t want to disappoint too many people, but the number of interesting political, historical conversations we had, you could stick in your ear, it wasn’t that many. We talked about friends, family and of course girls.
BEN BRADLEEAs a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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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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Our best today; better tomorrow.
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It changes your life, the pursuit of truth.
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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.
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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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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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You never monkey with the truth.
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There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!
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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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In the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”
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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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The first rough draft of history.
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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.
BEN BRADLEE