Tom Wicker Quotes

#1. Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world.

William Macneile Dixon

#2. In 1945, the world was in a shambles. American companies had no competition. So nobody really thought much about quality. Why should they? The world bought everything America produced. It was a prescription for disaster.

W. Edwards Deming

#3. Gay kids need to stop killing themselves because they are made to feel worthless by cruel and relentless bullying.

Zachary Quinto

#4. There seldom is enmity between seasoned old politicians, who know as much as men can of human weakness and human strength.

Tom Wicker

#5. If the true freedom of the press is to decide for itself what to publish and when to publish it, the true responsibility of the press must be to assert and defend that freedom ... What the press in America needs is less inhibition, not more restraint.

Tom Wicker

#6. It's a truism that denials never quite catch up with charges. Honest journalists who may have mistakenly printed false information know that the most prominent retraction never quite undoes the damage done by the original publication.

Tom Wicker

#7. Bullets an stuff be flying all over. It is something I simply cannot understand - why in hell is we doing all this, anyway? Playing football is one thing. But this, I do not know why. Goddamn.

Winston Groom

#8. 1972 was a year of many pleasant and rewarding experiences for me:

Chuck Mangione

#9. As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like.

Christopher Hitchens

#10. Feed the mind good wisdom, the body good nutrition, the soul good vibes, and the heart good love. Elevation for your situation.

T.F. Hodge

#11. Peace is the result of love, and if love were easy we'd all be good at it.

Colman McCarthy

#12. Consensus politics is a cyclical thing-in order to accumulate power, one must dispose of it, and as one disposes of it, one must accumulate more power to replace it. In financial terms, a dollar must be spent to make a dollar-or two, if things go well.

Tom Wicker

#13. it wasn't that we had been so brave or bold, but that we'd simply traded one fear for another - afraid of what we were about to do for the fear of what we might not. "How

Craig Johnson

#14. Our political parties exist for no other reason than to win power; they are not ideological debating societies designed to present a particular political philosophy and to persuade voters to accept it.

Tom Wicker

#15. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

Barack Obama

#16. The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

Thomas Mallon

#17. He [John F. Kennedy] might have envisioned himself being "alone, at the top" but, like Woodrow Wilson, he would find out that not even a President moves free of human entanglement, human needs, human illusions; not even a President can be independent of those around him.

Tom Wicker

#18. Government expands to absorb revenue - and then some.

Tom Wicker

#19. Education was central to reporting.

David Halberstam

#20. Offices are not powerful because they exist; men make them so. Rights are not honored because they exist; men compel their recognition.

Tom Wicker

#21. Nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the

Scott Anderson

#22. Pres. Lyndon Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth-as on the question of civil rights-he functioned like most men, as a product of his background.

Tom Wicker

#23. Obama's not Jesus. He can't walk on water.

Mr. T

#24. To know things as they are is better than to believe things as they seem.

Tom Wicker

#25. The danger to power is obsession - power junkies. You need a very strong mind and humor to balance yourself. If you don't, you will get shredded.

Frederick Lenz