Quotes from Tom Brokaw

I wanted to see what was going on in the world. I sometimes think I overwished.

This is the greatest generation any society has ever produced.

In your pursuit of your passions, always be young. In your relationship with others, always be grown-up.

You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world.

It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.

The WWII generation shares so many common values: duty, honor, country, personal responsibility and the marriage vow " For better or for worse--it was the last generation in which, broadly speaking, marriage was a commitment and divorce was not an option

A common lament of the World War II generation is the absence today of personal responsibility

there on the beaches of Normandy I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives were laced with the markings of greatness.

sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.

When the war ended, more than twelve million men and women put their uniforms aside and returned to civilian life. They went back to work at their old jobs or started small businesses; they became big-city cops and firemen; they finished their degrees or enrolled in college for the first time; they became schoolteachers

postwar America. He learned the insurance business by day and braille by night. Before long the VA found him a job with an elderly insurance broker in his neighborhood. Not too long after that, Broderick had established his own insurance

One of the things that we don't want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we're going to own that country.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed, to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace." —From John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, January 1961 Given

fortieth-anniversary project awakened my earliest memories. Between the ages of three and five I lived on an Army base in western South Dakota and spent a good deal of my time outdoors in a tiny helmet, shooting stick guns at imaginary

From him I learned that the men told the stories best themselves. So I told Meredith, "Whenever one of these guys comes over to say hello, just ask, 'Where were you that day?' You'll hear some unbelievable stories." And so we did, wherever we went. What we did not know at the time was that an old family friend back in our hometown of Yankton, South Dakota, had played a critical role in D-Day planning.

The D-Day fortieth-anniversary project awakened my earliest memories. Between the ages of three and five I lived on an Army base in western South Dakota and spent a good deal of my time outdoors in a tiny helmet, shooting stick guns at imaginary German and Japanese soldiers. My father, Red Brokaw, then in his early thirties, was an all-purpose Mr. Fix-It and operator of snow-plows and

Given a long enough life, cancer will eventually kill you—unless you die first of something else.

What was that World War I saying, "Trust the Lord and pass the ammo"? For me, trust the doctors and the Lord and pass the Velcade, Revlimid, dexamethasone.

It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it, buffer the passage of time. To keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF D-Day, I was broadcasting from the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, one of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The cemetery is at once haunting and beautiful, with 9,386 white marble headstones in long, even lines across the manicured fields of dark green, each headstone marking the death of a brave young American. The anniversary was a somber and celebratory

despair hovered over the land like a plague. They had watched their parents lose their businesses, their farms, their jobs, their hopes. They had learned to accept a future that played out one day

came of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over

You are not expected to know, but you are expected to wish to know.

Denial is a strong if imperfect defense.