Henry Grunwald

“Like other Americans, U.S. journalists have often neglected the study of history; they have much remedial work to do in trying to understand who did what to whom, why and when - and who did it first.”

“It is part of the fundamental impulse in all living things to reach for light, part of the indomitable will to see.”

“My eyes don't work, at least not fully, because they are blocked by disease. The scene around me appears through a kind of curtain, a haze.”

“In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's vital essence - a not wholly irrational belief.”

“See it all. See it fairly. Be truthful, be sensible and be careful with language. When nothing depends on man, everything depends on him.”

“My years with failing vision have prompted me to learn about the nature of the eye and the incredible gift of sight, which I had always taken for granted until it began to slip away.”

“Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.”

“The new history is really ancient history newly discovered. Journalists are taking crash courses in the blood-drenched background of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, North Ossetians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis.”

“A beach is not only a sweep of sand, but shells of sea creatures, the sea glass, the seaweed, the incongruous objects washed up by the ocean.”

“The Democrats have nothing to cheer but fear itself.”

“Home is one's birthplace, ratified by memory.”

“One must measure and conduct one's life on its own terms.”

“Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.”

“Libel actions, when we look at them in perspective, are an ornament of a civilized society. They have replaced, after all, at least in most cases, a resort to weapons in defense of a reputation.”

“Rationally, I was convinced that the universe without God made no sense, but that simply was not the same as believing. But I also knew that I could not argue myself, or be argued, into faith.”