“In the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.””

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.

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.

Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,

I came to understand that I’m never going to be the perfect mother, but I’m going to do the best I can. Same goes for everything in my life.

With expensive fashion, the inside should be as perfect as the outside.

All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

It is perfect in form, and unassailable in accuracy, and it is summed up in a formula from which all the phenomena may be deduced, and which must always remain the cardinal formula of electro-dynamics.

The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity.

It’s hard to see someone with a ‘perfect’ body and be like, ‘Why can’t I be like her?’ But that person was born to be who she is, and you’re born to be who you are.