In the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”
BEN BRADLEEThe champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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Our best today; better tomorrow.
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There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the 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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I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
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As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.
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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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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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More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.
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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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There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.
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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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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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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.
BEN BRADLEE