245 Quotes by Dan Rather

President Reagan had said, in a presidential debate against Walter Mondale, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Imagine: The patron saint of the modern conservative movement made the case for a concept that today would have him pilloried by the right-wing press and those cynical politicians who have learned to exploit division for their own electoral success.

On Capitol Hill, the Republican-controlled House voted mostly along party lines tonight to pass President Bush’s federal budget blueprint. This includes his big tax cut plan, partly bankrolled, critics say, through cuts in many federal aid programs for children and education.

It’s the ratings, stupid, don’t you know? They’ve got us putting more fuzz and wuzz on the air, cop-show stuff.

Americans are once again looking outward.

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It’s, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

Going into the forest with my dad was a backdrop to my young life. It was just what people did. I was expected to be able to identify the species of trees and to know how to avoid getting lost. Nature wasn’t something that you drove to, or planned on seeing, or for which you bought a fancy outdoor wardrobe. I worry that now it is an activity that must compete with soccer practices, homework, piano lessons, and all the other responsibilities that fill up the calendar of a family with children.

Well, first of all, I don’t want to debate the word conservative, but by my definition, a conservative is someone who wants to conserve the Constitution of the United States and the American tradition and law that no one is above the law.

We all have come here from somewhere else, and the vast majority of us are only a few generations removed from another land. Whether that is one generation or ten, it seems rather sanctimonious to claim that there is much of a difference. Not many of us can trace our arrival back a few hundred years, let alone millennia. But even the ancestors of the Native Americans are believed to have come across a land bridge from Asia – a reminder that we are a species of migrations, and always have been.

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