160 Quotes by David Halberstam

he was almost joyously what he had always been, a lot of gee whiz, it was all new and fresh even when surely he had seen much of it before, and it was as if he took delight in not having been changed externally by all that he had seen.

Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.

It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.

If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.

The telephone was a sign of being rushed.

The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.

(I. F. Stone had once called it an exciting paper to read because you never knew on what page you would find a page-one story),

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.