“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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Nixon administration really put a lot of pressure on CBS not to run the second broadcast.

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

It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.

The first rough draft of history.

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.

The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

I never stepped foot into a Brooks Brothers before Mad Men.

Am I little mad for writing someone I’ll never have?

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.

And I’m not so in love with making people mad that I want to live my life around it.

Tell me, do you think I’m going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.

Tell me, do you think I’m going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.