Top 100 David Halberstam Quotes
#1. Peterson thought it an unusual friendship, one only the Army could forge.
David Halberstam
#2. As he found beauty in the hamburger, he thought hot dogs unattractive - both aesthetically and commercially.
David Halberstam
#3. He was more passionate than most intelligent men, and more intelligent and reasoned than most passionate men.
David Halberstam
#5. You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.
David Halberstam
#6. The ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter's career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.
David Halberstam
#7. True wisdom ... is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.
David Halberstam
#8. The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.
David Halberstam
#9. Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefiled and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
David Halberstam
#10. Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.
David Halberstam
#11. He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.
David Halberstam
#12. Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.
David Halberstam
#13. If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.
David Halberstam
#14. She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.
David Halberstam
#15. Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was - by Time corporate standards - just a little lazy.
David Halberstam
#16. His was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,
David Halberstam
#17. Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.
David Halberstam
#18. He did not like Europe, which he regarded as a lesser continent, populated with people significantly greedier and more materialistic than Americans. It was a place, he noted, where
David Halberstam
#20. He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.
David Halberstam
#21. The men were always wary of an officer who took form more seriously than function.
David Halberstam
#22. [David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.
David Halberstam
#24. Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence.
David Halberstam
#25. If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.
David Halberstam
#27. His body language was that of someone frozen and not yet thawed out.
David Halberstam
#28. He wanted to be respectable rather than powerful; he did not want the controversy that went with power.
David Halberstam
#29. He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.
David Halberstam
#30. Alexander Dow, his boss at Edison, who thought him immensely talented, tried to dissuade him. "Electricity, yes," Dow told Ford. "That's the coming thing. But gas - no.
David Halberstam
#31. This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.
David Halberstam
#32. Officers came and went and were never a part of daily life.
David Halberstam
#33. If she was making the right and courageous decisions, he thought, she was nonetheless unhappy and somewhat resentful about doing it
David Halberstam
#34. It was like that afore you got here, it's like that now, and it's going to be like that when you and me are gone, departed and left, and so there is only one rule, swing with it and smile.
David Halberstam
#35. Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians,
David Halberstam
#36. Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.
David Halberstam
#37. Physically, rowing was remarkable resistant to the camera ... the camera liked power exhibited more openly, and the power of the oarsmen [is] exhibited in far too controlled a setting. Besides, the camera liked to focus on individuals, and except for the single scull, crew was sport without faces.
David Halberstam
#38. I am the most skeptical of men in one of the most skeptical of professions in a world which regrettably holds out fewer and fewer dreams the older I get. But on the water, fly rod in hand, my dreams never desert me ... I am never without hope.
David Halberstam
#39. She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself.
David Halberstam
#40. She had no fear of the spotlight, only of the places it did not reach.
David Halberstam
#41. If you have to write it down, you don't know it well enough,
David Halberstam
#42. Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person - the two are often different.
David Halberstam
#43. When you are discussing a successful coach," sports psychologist Bruce Ogilvie once said, not of Ramsay but of the entire profession, "you are not necessarily drawing the profile of an entirely healthy person.
David Halberstam
#44. If he (George Keenan)felt on occasion more than a little uncomfortable when being listened to, then he was truly unhappy when not being listened to.
David Halberstam
#45. 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.
David Halberstam
#46. The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it.
David Halberstam
#47. These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.
David Halberstam
#48. The problem with military policies that are built to domestic specifications and do not take into account the complexity of the real world is that eventually the real world intrudes.
David Halberstam
#49. Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
David Halberstam
#50. They (the media) found little quality of depth to him, that when she said on the platform with that which he said to them in private. The qualities of introspection and reflectiveness that they particularly treasured were missing.
David Halberstam
#51. There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.
David Halberstam
#52. David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.
David Halberstam
#53. The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.
David Halberstam
#54. In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.
David Halberstam
#55. No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.
David Halberstam
#56. One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.
David Halberstam
#57. Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.
David Halberstam
#58. Young man, Mr. Aubrey has made us so rich that we can now afford to worry about our image.
David Halberstam
#59. In 1953, at the beginning of the Eisenhower era and the glory years of the auto industry, Hudson's had done $153 million in retail sales; in 1981 the downtown Hudson's had done only $44 million - a figure, if adjusted for inflation, about 6 percent of the 1953 total.
David Halberstam
#60. He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.
David Halberstam
#61. I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people.
David Halberstam
#62. What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.
David Halberstam
#63. If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.
David Halberstam
#64. Listen, girlie," said one of the executives of Cadillac, a particularly troubled company, to Maryann Keller, an astute and skeptical financial analyst on Wall Street, "it's ready to turn around, and it's going to be bigger than ever.
David Halberstam
#65. One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.
David Halberstam
#66. If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.
David Halberstam
#67. The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.
David Halberstam
#68. It was the kind of country that made you feel better about yourself.
David Halberstam
#69. Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.
David Halberstam
#70. The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.
David Halberstam
#71. They cut the menu from twenty-five items to nine, featuring hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and they made the burgers a little smaller - ten hamburgers from one pound of meat instead of eight.
David Halberstam
#72. This edition of The Making of a Quagmire differs in a number of ways from the original one. Approximately one-third of the text has been cut in an effort to eliminate material that seemed clearly redundant or that did not relate directly to the Vietnam war.
David Halberstam
#73. Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
David Halberstam
#75. [On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"
(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)
David Halberstam
#76. He knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.
David Halberstam
#77. He was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.
David Halberstam
#78. Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.
David Halberstam
#79. It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.
David Halberstam
#80. When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. "Make something," he admonished. "Create something.
David Halberstam
#81. Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it
David Halberstam
#82. One percent of the population ruled - and they were all grafters - while the other ninety-nine percent live under the worst kind of feudalism.
David Halberstam
#83. When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.
David Halberstam
#84. Was he the kind of man you wanted next to you in a foxhole? - a saying used almost always by men who had never been in foxholes about other men who had never been in foxholes either.
David Halberstam
#85. It was the responsibility of a senior fireman to teach as well as to do.
David Halberstam
#86. A good team was simply a group of very disparate athletes who assembled each day from radically different lives and - with luck - for one shared moment put aside their differences, their dislikes, their egos and their rivalries, harnessing their energies towards a common goal.
David Halberstam
#87. Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.
David Halberstam
#88. Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing
David Halberstam
#89. The most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable.
David Halberstam
#90. If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.
David Halberstam
#91. Nixon under pressure turned only to reporters from publications already favorable to him; Kennedy, in trouble, turned to those most critical and dubious of him, and if anything tended to take those already for him a bit for granted.
David Halberstam
#92. One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.
David Halberstam
#93. The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.
David Halberstam
#94. He was not what gentlemen usually thought a gentleman was.
David Halberstam
#95. Research is an organized method of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.
David Halberstam
#96. When, in the immediate postwar era, someone at Chrysler had designed a smaller, low-slung car, K. T. Keller, the company's top executive, had mocked it. "Chrysler builds cars to sit in," he said, "not to piss over.
David Halberstam
#97. There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'
David Halberstam
#98. With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
David Halberstam
#99. His failure to adapt to new techniques, to pander (his own word), probably made his supporters love him all the more, and probably also narrowed his political base.
David Halberstam
#100. Williams had a very shrewd sense of how much heat the organism could take at any given time;
David Halberstam
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