67 Quotes by Ben Bradlee

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

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, 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.

Sometimes I am convinced there is nothing wrong with this country that couldn’t be cured by the magical implantation of ethical standards on us all – leaders and followers. Until that becomes doable, the Center for Public Integrity is just about the best thing we have going for us.

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.

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.

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

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.

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