Top 90 Walter Cronkite Quotes
#1. It is not the reporter's job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts.
Walter Cronkite
#2. If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism
that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.
Walter Cronkite
#3. The daily coverage of the Vietnamese battlefield helped convince the American public that the carnage was not worth the candle.
Walter Cronkite
#4. Reagan was an exceedingly likeable guy, just a heck of a nice fellow, despite his politics. He was funny and loved a good joke, the dirtier, I'm afraid the more ethnic, the better. I don't think he brought very much to the presidency, except charisma and success.
Walter Cronkite
#5. The sweet smell of the South, of Camellias and Azaleas, clings to Beaufort's ancient and historic buildings.
Walter Cronkite
#6. When the Eagle landed on the moon, I was speechless - overwhelmed, like most of the world. Couldn't say a word. I think all I said was, 'Wow! Jeez!' Not exactly immortal. Well, I was nothing if not human.
Walter Cronkite
#7. In all my years as a news commentator I was never once, able to tell the truth, about anything.
Walter Cronkite
#8. We've always known you can gain circulation or viewers by cheapening the product, and now you're finding the bad driving out the good.
Walter Cronkite
#9. Ethics must be reintroduced to public service to restore people's faith in government. Without such faith, democracy cannot flourish. Your ambitious agenda is filling a desperate need.
Walter Cronkite
#10. Those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.
Walter Cronkite
#11. I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since.
Walter Cronkite
#12. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.
Walter Cronkite
#13. Old anchormen, you see, don't fade away. They just keep coming back for more. And that's the way it is, Friday, March 6, 1981.
Walter Cronkite
#14. We're living in a state where no one can trust his telephone conversations, nor even his personal conversations in a room, in a bar or anywhere else.
Walter Cronkite
#15. I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.
Walter Cronkite
#16. Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible.
Walter Cronkite
#17. Interviewing friends is a tough one. Your duty to the interview must transcend your friendship. Occasionally you'll lose a friend.
Walter Cronkite
#18. We are on the precipice of being so ignorant that our democracy is threatened.
Walter Cronkite
#19. America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
Walter Cronkite
#20. I guess I showed certain signs of being a workaholic in early years; I had a magazine route very early on - I must have been about seven or eight years old or something like that - when I was carrying Liberty magazine, trying to win green and brown coupons; I eventually [won] a pony.
Walter Cronkite
#21. I am neither Republican nor Democrat. I am a registered independent because I find that I cast my votes not on the basis of party loyalty but on the issues of the moment and my assessment of the candidates.
Walter Cronkite
#22. We must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a World Government, patterned after our Own Government with a legislature, executive and judiciary and police.
Walter Cronkite
#23. Would it be better to have a president who cries easily? Well, that depends on what he cried about. I would not like the thought of a president who could not cry. That would be worse than one who cried over the right things. Which, in this case, would be the things I would cry over.
Walter Cronkite
#24. News reporters are certainly liberal and left of center.
Walter Cronkite
#25. Television [is] a high-impact medium. It does some things no other force can do-transmitting electronic pictures through the air. Still, as an explored, comprehensive medium, it is not a substitute for print.
Walter Cronkite
#26. We know that no one should tell a woman she has to bear an unwanted child. We know that religious beliefs cannot define patriotism.
Walter Cronkite
#27. For nearly five decades the World Federalists have worked to promote a strengthened UN and more effective institutions of global governance. I offer my personal endorsement. Now a great opportunity has opened for the realization of the dreams of the UN's founders.
Walter Cronkite
#28. Probably the most important single element that I found in my own marriage was a sense of humor. My wife had a delicious sense of humor, and I think I have an adequate one.
Walter Cronkite
#29. I think somebody ought to do a survey as to how many great, important men have quit to spend time with their families who spent any more time with their family.
Walter Cronkite
#30. The first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world.
Walter Cronkite
#31. I've gone from the most trusted man in America to one of the most debated.
Walter Cronkite
#32. We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait.
Walter Cronkite
#33. Justice was born outside the home and a long way from it; and it has never been adopted there
Walter Cronkite
#34. When you're bringing in a fairly unknown candidate challenging a sitting president, the population needs a lot more information than reduced coverage provides.
Walter Cronkite
#35. Pat Robertson has written in a book a few years ago that we should have a world government, but only when the Messiah arrives. He wrote, literally, any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the Devil. Well join me - I'm glad to sit here at the right hand of Satan.
Walter Cronkite
#36. In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.
Walter Cronkite
#37. Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.
Walter Cronkite
#38. We've got a great percentage of our population that, to our great shame, either cannot or, equally unfortunate, will not read. And that portion of our public is growing. Those people are suckers for the demagogue.
Walter Cronkite
#39. Our task is not to tell the truth; we are opinion molders.
Walter Cronkite
#41. Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.
Walter Cronkite
#43. I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got.
Walter Cronkite
#44. I think he [composer Joe Raposo] was the first man who kissed me on the cheek.
Walter Cronkite
#45. Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.
Walter Cronkite
#46. I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.
Walter Cronkite
#48. We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.
Walter Cronkite
#49. A system of world order-preferably a system of world government -is mandatory ... The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty ...
Walter Cronkite
#50. There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.
Walter Cronkite
#51. I am dumbfounded that there hasn't been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet.
Walter Cronkite
#52. When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old. Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity.
Walter Cronkite
#53. The profession of journalism ought to be about telling people what they need to know - not what they want to know.
Walter Cronkite
#54. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists.
Walter Cronkite
#55. People who understand music hear sounds that no one else makes when Frank Sinatra sings.
Walter Cronkite
#56. The debates are part of the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become a format that defies meaningful discourse. They should be charged with sabotaging the electoral process.
Walter Cronkite
#57. The battle for the airwaves cannot be limited to only those who have the bank accounts to pay for the battle and win it.
Walter Cronkite
#58. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past,
Walter Cronkite
#59. I'm a romanticist in many ways. I never get behind the wheel of my boat and dropping the anchor without saying to myself, secretly giving my orders to the crew "All right, lift the anchor, we're on our way to South Hampton. We're gonna beat them there with this load of tea!"
Walter Cronkite
#60. It seems to me that instead of cutting taxes, we ought to be increasing the taxes to pay off the deficit, rather than let that thing build up to the point where our grandchildren's grandchildren are going to be paying for our period of time and our years at the helm.
Walter Cronkite
#63. The perils of duck hunting are great - especially for the duck.
Walter Cronkite
#64. Not only do we have a right to know, we have a duty to know what our Government is doing in our name. If there's a criticism to be made today, it's that the press isn't doing enough to put the pressure on the government to provide information.
Walter Cronkite
#65. Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough.
Walter Cronkite
#66. I'm very proud of what Harry Truman turned out to be in office and the record he made. Certainly I think he'll go down in history as one of the greats, because of his conscience, his determination to stick with what he knew was right.
Walter Cronkite
#67. The 60s undoubtedly were the most turbulent years of the century.
Walter Cronkite
#68. Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.
Walter Cronkite
#69. Putting it as strongly as I can, the failure to give free airtime for our political campaigns endangers our democracy.
Walter Cronkite
#71. I'm still ready to go to the moon, if they'll take me.
Walter Cronkite
#72. There's a little more ego involved in these jobs than people might realize.
Walter Cronkite
#73. I asked [my doctors] if I'd be able to play singles tennis and they said I could. That made me very happy since I haven't played in five years.
Walter Cronkite
#74. I am not a contemplative type, basically. I am much more of an action person and, as a consequence, I look forward to today and tomorrow and what's breaking.
Walter Cronkite
#75. The ruling class is the rich ... And those people are so able to manipulate our democracy that they really control the democracy.
Walter Cronkite
#76. Let us hear the peal of a new international liberty bell that calls us all to the creation of a system of enforceable world law in which the universal desire for peace can place its hope
and prayers.
Walter Cronkite
#77. Success is more permanent when you achieve it without destroying your principles.
Walter Cronkite
#78. The ethic of the journalist is to recognize one's prejudices, biases, and avoid getting them into print.
Walter Cronkite
#79. I was lucky enough to have one of the first high school classes in the country.
Walter Cronkite
#80. For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience.
Walter Cronkite
#81. I never had the ambition to be something. I had the ambition to do something.
Walter Cronkite
#82. Everybody knows that there's a liberal, that there's a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents.
Walter Cronkite
#84. There is a compulsion that is perhaps the heart of life's meanings, this marvelous mystery of blood ties that brings joy whenever a new family member comes on the scene.
Walter Cronkite
#85. I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis.
Walter Cronkite
#86. The great sadness of my life is that I never achieved the hour newscast, which would not have been twice as good as the half-hour newscast, but many times as good.
Walter Cronkite
#87. I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst. I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.
Walter Cronkite
#88. Our country today is at a stage in our foreign policy similar to that crucial point in our nation's early history when our Constitution was produced in Philadelphia.
Walter Cronkite
#89. For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.
Walter Cronkite
#90. I sort of think in a way that many of us young reporters who had the opportunity to go overseas for our organizations were kind of, in a sense, war profiteers. We were enhancing our careers while covering that terrible conflict.
Walter Cronkite
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