Quotes from Carl Bernstein

Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.

Even at the end of a presidential election campaign, we have no way to know what Mitt Romney really believes.

John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans.

The most important ethical issues and the most difficult ones are the human ones because a reporter has enormous power to hurt people.

There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

The great thing about Watergate is, is that the system worked. The American system worked. The press did its job. We did what we were supposed to do.

Hillary [Clinton] is neither the demon of the right's perception, nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time perhaps more old-fashioned than modern.

There's no way to know the motives of another person totally, even a person that you know very well.

You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line.

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism.

The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; it's broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.

In the John Paul II days, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had the advantage of staying in his cupboard - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - exchanging views only with the Pope, and speaking publicly only through carefully written missives on doctrinal issues.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees - famously in recent years at 'The Washington Post,' 'The New York Times,' and the three original TV networks.

They walked across 15th Street to the Madison Hotel's Montpelier Room, an opulent French restaurant. Bradlee asked for a corner table, and began the conversation. 'You'd better bring me up to date because...' He turned to order lunch in perfect French, and then turned back to Woodward. '...our cocks are on the chopping block now and I just want to know a little bit more about this.

about Jimmy Carter

Because the floor numbers were listed next to the names and phone extensions of committee personnel, it was possible to calculate roughly who worked in proximity to whom. And by transposing telephone extensions from the roster and listing them in sequence, it was even possible to determine who worked for whom.

The phone rang about five minutes later. Powell Moore wanted to know if the committee's second statement had made the paper. Bernstein said it had, as well as Mitchell's additional comments on the matter. Moore sounded worried. What had the Attorney General said? Bernstein read him the insert and told him it was already being set in type. "Oh," said Moore.

You've just had an order from your Commander in Chief," Haig said. Watts could not resign. "Fuck you, Al," Watts said. "I just did." Kissinger called his staff together in the Executive Office Building to plead for their support of the decision. "We are all the President's men," he said, "and we've got to behave that way.

The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the Post (and then up the hierarchical line of editors) was 'What have you done for me today?' Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Deep Throat stamped his foot. "A conspiracy like this . . . a conspiracy investigation . . . the rope has to tighten slowly around everyone's neck. You build convincingly from the outer edges in, you get ten times the evidence you need against the Hunts and Liddys. They feel hopelessly finished—they may not talk right away, but the grip is on them. Then you move up and do the same thing at the next level.