Top 100 Tom Brokaw Sayings
#2. I had good care going. I had Meredith and the family. And I didn't want to become the object of some kind of pity, most of all. I didn't want to show up on the Internet, 'Tom Brokaw has cancer.'
Tom Brokaw
#3. There's a rumor that NBC is going to have Tom Brokaw fill in temporarily as the NBC News anchor. When asked why, a network spokesperson said, 'Because the only other NBC person we have is Bill Cosby.'
Conan O'Brien
#4. One of the nicest things about NBC is that Tom Brokaw is not Dan Rather.
Michael Gartner
#5. The competition is very stiff. Brian Williams has proved himself as a credible news anchor (at NBC), and Bob Schieffer has done the same (at CBS). But as Peter and Tom (Brokaw) and Dan have always said about the competition, it makes us all better.
Bill Vaughan
#6. I have this vision of maybe going the way of Bill Kurtis and, I think, Tom Brokaw, to a certain extent - the ability to not be tied to the desk anymore, but to do projects that are meaningful to you.
Lester Holt
#7. The press was all over to get a picture of me. It got to the point where they were all over my house, following me to work ... Then Tom Brokaw and everybody else was doing stories, 'A star is born.'
Fawn Hall
#8. In the beginning when I sat next to Tom Brokaw on the 'Today' show, the stories I was interested in were those having to do with women and children and learning and health. In those days, 25 to 30 years ago, that was called soft news, and not in a nice way.
Jane Pauley
#9. Washington tends to be full of too many traps. I think reporters there do a lot of attending news briefings and news conferences expecting to get the real news out of those relatively sterile environments. But you've got to deal with the obscure people as well as the names.
Tom Brokaw
#10. What I think is that Fox has done a very smart job of carving out their place.
Tom Brokaw
#11. I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I'd say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.
Tom Brokaw
#12. I always think there are people looking not so much for information as for reassurance and reaffirmation of their views.
Tom Brokaw
#13. No text message will ever replace the first kiss.
Tom Brokaw
#14. The meaningful role of the father of the bride was played out long before the church music began. It stretched across those years of infancy and puberty, adolescence and young adulthood. That's when she needs you at her side.
Tom Brokaw
#15. My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.
Tom Brokaw
#16. It doesn't do any good to wire the world if we short circuit the soul.
Tom Brokaw
#17. Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years - from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 - women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.
Tom Brokaw
#18. One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children.
Tom Brokaw
#19. I would say that we have not completely cracked the code of the '60s. We are still finding our way through that time.
Tom Brokaw
#20. When you run in places you visit, you encounter things you'd never see otherwise.
Tom Brokaw
#21. The conceit of an anchorman is we never think we're going to die, I suppose.
Tom Brokaw
#22. The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.
Tom Brokaw
#23. Forty years after the greatest scandal of the American presidency, Elizabeth Drew's account in Washington Journal remains fresh and riveting, instructive and evocative. Her afterword on Nixon's post-Watergate life is equally compelling.
Tom Brokaw
#24. There are lots of dimensions to being a cancer patient. The overwhelming one is that it takes over your life.
Tom Brokaw
#25. There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.
Tom Brokaw
#26. The response to 'The Greatest Generation' and the books that followed has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.
Tom Brokaw
#27. Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.
Tom Brokaw
#28. What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.
Tom Brokaw
#29. Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Facts are your firewall against bias.
Tom Brokaw
#30. You will not get a Google alert when you fall in love.
Tom Brokaw
#31. The favourite bumper sticker in Washington D.C. right now is one that says 'First Iraq, then France'
Tom Brokaw
#32. The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.
Tom Brokaw
#33. I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.
Tom Brokaw
#34. We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.
Tom Brokaw
#35. It is not enough to wire the world if you short-circuit the soul. Technology without heart is not enough.
Tom Brokaw
#36. You convey something that the public either trusts or it does not trust, and it has to do with the content and how you handle the news, but it also just has something to do with your persona.
Tom Brokaw
#37. Judy Miller is the most innocent person in this case. I really thought that was outrageous that she was jailed and we needed as journalists to draw a line in the sand in a strong but thoughtful way.
Tom Brokaw
#38. People are beginning to doubt the moral certitude of people on the right, especially the far right.
Tom Brokaw
#39. Given a long enough life, cancer will eventually kill you - unless you die first of something else.
Tom Brokaw
#40. Is that cancer curable or just treatable.
Tom Brokaw
#41. Most patients enter a doctor's office or hospital as if it were a Mayan temple, representing an ancient and mysterious culture with no language in common with the visitor.
Tom Brokaw
#42. My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.
Tom Brokaw
#43. In our family, where we began with no money, we like to say that we have discovered that God invented money so those who have it can help others.
Tom Brokaw
#44. Peter, of the three of us, was our prince. He seemed so timeless. He had such elan and style.
Tom Brokaw
#45. Sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.
Tom Brokaw
#47. We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda's attacks on America launched the nation into three wars - against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.
Tom Brokaw
#48. Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now.
Tom Brokaw
#49. We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.
Tom Brokaw
#50. In your pursuit of your passions, always be young. In your relationship with others, always be grown-up.
Tom Brokaw
#51. I wanted to see what was going on in the world. I sometimes think I overwished.
Tom Brokaw
#52. People do not like to have their favorite myths of idols challenged and as a rule I think that the public does not like bad news.
Tom Brokaw
#53. I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.
Tom Brokaw
#54. In the seasons of life, I have had more than my share of summers.
Tom Brokaw
#55. I guess the issue that I have with all the news organizations that have a political MO, if you will, attached to them is that they sometimes jump to conclusions about what this will mean. Get ahead of themselves.
Tom Brokaw
#56. When he entered the Oval Office - by fate, not by design - Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?
Tom Brokaw
#57. These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome.
Tom Brokaw
#58. Originally, the main purpose of the convention was to determine who the party would have as the presidential nominee and the vice-presidential nominee.
Tom Brokaw
#59. Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck.
Tom Brokaw
#60. I had gone to all the big stories of the '80s, which was one of the most fertile times in American journalism, around the world and here as well.
Tom Brokaw
#61. Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was, and he didn't require consultants or gurus to change him.
Tom Brokaw
#62. Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.
Tom Brokaw
#63. Established a thriving medical practice and was a fixture at our high school sports games. He never spoke to any of us of the horrors he had seen. When one of his sons wore as a casual jacket one of Doc Auld's Army coats with the major's insignia still attached, I remember thinking,
Tom Brokaw
#64. Don't be afraid to do something unconventional, to take a chance, to risk something.
Tom Brokaw
#65. It's not the questions that get us in trouble - it's the answers ...
Tom Brokaw
#66. Broderick's unit shipped out to England as replacements for the 82nd Airborne men lost in the Normandy
Tom Brokaw
#67. I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.
Tom Brokaw
#68. It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.
Tom Brokaw
#69. One of the advantages of being a national journalist of some recognition is that you come across high-profile people, and many become your friends.
Tom Brokaw
#70. Continuous coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf will resume in a moment.
Tom Brokaw
#71. During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.
Tom Brokaw
#72. Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.
Tom Brokaw
#73. In one way or another, President Obama's critics will dog him all the way to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and even his admirers will continue to have doubts about his accomplishments if not his promise.
Tom Brokaw
#74. Peter is an old friend. I'm heartbroken, but he's also a tough guy. I'm counting on him getting through this very difficult passage.
Tom Brokaw
#75. I've adopted the guideline of Warren Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, who says I wanna know where I'll be when I die - so I never go there.
Tom Brokaw
#76. What I think is highly inappropriate is what's going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS News that's quite outrageous.
Tom Brokaw
#77. Everywhere I go - from Main Street to Wall Street - people ask, 'What's happened to our political system? Why can't Washington folks work together?'
Tom Brokaw
#78. It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.
Tom Brokaw
#79. 1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.
Tom Brokaw
#80. The WWII generation shares so many common values: duty, honor, country, personal responsibility and the marriage vow For better or for worse
it was the last generation in which, broadly speaking, marriage was a commitment and divorce was not an option
Tom Brokaw
#81. You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world.
Tom Brokaw
#82. My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.
Tom Brokaw
#83. I played high school basketball at six feet, then I went to 5-11 in my 50's, and then, bang, I went down to 5-9.
Tom Brokaw
#84. I think it's very much a matter between Barbara Walters and ABC.
Tom Brokaw
#85. Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa's sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.
Tom Brokaw
#86. Cancer has given me a dose of humility. I'm much more empathetic. It's a club I would rather not have joined, but it is a club.
Tom Brokaw
#87. I've seen a lot of seasons, change in my time. It's been a very lucky life.
Tom Brokaw
#88. My family is not only attractive - I can say that because I'm paterfamilias - but they're really smart, and they're very, very compassionate.
Tom Brokaw
#89. Bob Hope was an entertainment colossus, shrewd and influential well beyond show business. Richard Zoglin's biography captures it all
the public and private Hope.
Tom Brokaw
#90. In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.
Tom Brokaw
#91. There is no delete button for bigotry.
Tom Brokaw
#92. While attendance at traditional churches has been declining for decades ... the evangelical movement is growing, and it is changing the way America worships.
Tom Brokaw
#93. We don't play the celebrity business in our family.
Tom Brokaw
#94. The real test of an anchor is when there's a very big event. Sept. 11 is the quintessential example of that, and that day it took everything that I knew as an anchor, as a citizen, as a father, as a husband, to get through it.
Tom Brokaw
#95. I was on the board of the Mayo Clinic. I was diagnosed there, and I could pick up the phone and get a hold of whoever I wanted to. What I learned is that you really have to get proactive and manage your case.
Tom Brokaw
#96. I've interviewed presidents and royalty, rock stars and movie stars, famous generals and captains of industry; I've had front row seats at Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games; my books have been on best-seller lists, and my marriage is a long-running success.
Tom Brokaw
#97. I think people of my generation became journalists - you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers - because we wanted to report the big stories.
Tom Brokaw
#98. In Los Angeles, I had the good fortune of anchoring the news right before Johnny Carson came on, so to see him, the Hollywood stars watched me first.
Tom Brokaw
#99. I've been lucky from my earliest memory on. I happened to be born to the right parents, and the lives we led - working class, migratory - suited my personality. I had an adventurous mindset, and we lived on an Army base, then in South Dakota - it was a dynamic environment.
Tom Brokaw
#100. I remain the luckiest guy I know.
Tom Brokaw
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