It changes your life, the pursuit of truth.
BEN BRADLEEGenerals who can write always make me nervous.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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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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More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.
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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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Those [Watergate] tapes are going to take me to my grave with a huge smile on my face.
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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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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.
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There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.
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As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.
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It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.
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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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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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There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!
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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 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 BRADLEE