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.
BEN BRADLEEIt 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.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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You never monkey with the truth.
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The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.
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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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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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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 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.
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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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Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.
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There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.
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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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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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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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I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
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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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