Jake Tapper

“Resist the temptation to subject yourself only to that which re-affirms what you already think.”

“It took me years to realize I wanted to be in journalism.”

“There are a lot of good writers in TV!”

“I don't really get nervous anymore unless there's a big interview.”

“I think there are periods in this country when behavior is abhorrent: McCarthy, Watergate, Bill Clinton. It's just a question of how the checks and balances in the American system work and how leaders stand up to it or don't stand up to it.”

“Equating brutality and despotism with leadership is not an American value.”

“'MAD Magazine' put out a book that was a collection of Trump cartoons, and they asked me to do the forward because they knew that I was a fan because I'd done stories and tweeted about 'MAD.' So I did the forward and asked them if I could do a cartoon. They let me, and I did caricatures of myself and Wolf Blitzer.”

“I choose to make it my job to not automatically believe what the U.S. government says.”

“You know what takes effort? Being kind, being patient, being respectful, telling someone how you feel politely instead of just avoiding them for six weeks.”

“I think standing up for facts and decency is important, and we should've done more of it back in 2015 and 2016.”

“McCarthyism and Trumpism are very different. They stand for very different things, but the technique of the big lie, smearing and telling lies, you know, McCarthy was doing that. At the time, the media, Democrats, and Republicans were all paralyzed - not all, but most of them were paralyzed. They didn't know how to deal with this.”

“Embrace the humanity of everyone, especially those you don't understand.”

“Don't get me wrong: politicians have been lying for a long time, long before Donald Trump was born, but the degree of just nonstop rage, grievance, prevarication, I haven't seen, probably because we haven't had a direct line from a politician's id to the public before.”

“I get a lot of heat from the Left, which is bizarre. I get a lot of heat from the Right, too, but the vitriol is from the Left.”

“They say history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

“It matters to people that the president tell them the truth.”

“Mean is easy. Mean is lazy. Mean is self-satisfied and slothful.”

“My first race was '99/2000. At that time, I was at 'Salon,' and I was basically their campaign reporter, so I would just jump around from race to race, candidate to candidate.”

“Professionally and personally, I try to be as agnostic as possible, try to see things as objectively as possible.”

“Politicians lie.”