Carl Bernstein Quotes

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

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

#3. The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we, too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!

Carl Bernstein

#4. If you are a great news organization, you can't have the best obtainable version of the truth if your vision and your scale is reduced to a fraction of its former self.

Carl Bernstein

#5. Marilyn, I have a wife and family and a dog and a cat.

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

#7. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.

Carl Bernstein

#8. The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.

Carl Bernstein

#9. Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides rules and services and safety measures that contribute to a better society.

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

#11. The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

#13. 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.

Carl Bernstein

#14. 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.

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

#17. 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.

Carl Bernstein

#18. There's something totally crazy about this.

Carl Bernstein

#19. Religion is one of the fundaments of Hillary Clinton's character and politics.

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

#22. 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.

Carl Bernstein

#23. 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. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

Carl Bernstein

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

Carl Bernstein

#25. 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.

Carl Bernstein

#26. 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

Carl Bernstein

#27. 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.

Carl Bernstein