Quotes from Walter Cronkite

I never took any elocution lessons, no diction lessons. I might have been a pretty decent broadcaster if I had, but what you see, I'm afraid, is what you get.

I think cameras ought to be everywhere the reporters are allowed to go. I think, furthermore, reporters and cameras ought to be everywhere that the Constitution says the public can go.

Helping set the day's agenda and deciding what we used and editing it, that was a journalistic high point. I liked reporting as well. Just doing the news - the live performance - wasn't important. Working on the desk was.

It's hard for us to really understand the immensity so far of the conquest of space.

History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.

Part of the new morality of the '60s and '70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability.

Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.

Give news a little more time, and don't request that they also, in their news time, entertain. We're not entertainers. We're journalists. And we need more time to do our job well.

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

It's a little hard not to be an elitist when you're making millions of dollars a year.

Arianna Huffington has exercised her renowned wisdom to give journalism another boost along the ever busier Internet. Her blog site promises to be an interesting challenge for those of us lucky enough to be invited to participate with our occasional contributions.

I don't believe in these headline-hunting interviews. That's just not my style.

For heaven's sakes, in the newspaper days, when we had competing newspapers, and the newsstands sale was as important as the circulation - as the agreed-upon circulation, whatever you call that - in those days, why, gosh, the sensationalism was tremendous.

Court proceedings, except for certain limited situations, are open to the public. This is for the protection of the accused, to be certain to ascertain that there is a fair trial.

The profession of journalism ought to be about telling people what they need to know - not what they want to know.

Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible.

Maybe I'm just a slow learner or something, but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible.

I had discovered journalism to be my life's ambition.

The military people don't like it; the government probably doesn't like it, but the people should know what they're sending their young people into when they permit their governments to declare war and engage in war.

There were a few youthful fishing trips, but I never enjoyed the experiences, partly because I didn't like hurting the bait.

On television, I tried to absolutely hew to the middle of the road and not show any prejudice or bias in any way.

We have more and more one-newspaper towns, and that troubles me.

I'm so tired of stories starting, 'Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.' You've got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven's sake. Everybody doesn't have to be an O. Henry.

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.