“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.”

Our best today; better tomorrow.

There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.

The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.

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.

There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!

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

If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be ‘gotcha’ journalism, but it’s also good journalism.

The biggest difference between Kennedy and Nixon, as far as the press is concerned, is simply this: Jack Kennedy really liked newspaper people and he really enjoyed sparring with journalists.

It changes your life, the pursuit of truth.

Generals who can write always make me nervous.

Maybe some of today’s papers have too many ‘feel-good’ features, but there is a lot of good news out there.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

The notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.

First of all, it has gone past God and past Christ right through to me. If it has come that far.

There is no circumstance, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me.

I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.

There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.

Actors aren’t stupid, mostly, and if there’s a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director’s going for, if you’re aware of that too, you can do things to help that.