Jim Lehrer

“My conscience is clear.”

“If you go to the ball game, you don't need to read the game story.”

“I'm not in the judgment part of journalism.”

“There's only one interview technique that matters... Do your homework so you can listen to the answers and react to them and ask follow-ups. Do your homework, prepare.”

“On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there.”

“If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it.”

“I wanted to be a bus driver when I was a kid. I look at bus driving through the eyes of a little boy. I see it as glamorous.”

“Those who know me know I won't hesitate to turn around and point someone out.”

“As I say, I'm a discourse advocate. What form it comes is less important to me than the fact that there is discourse.”

“My writing is extremely important, so I write every day. I just enjoy it. I get a kick out of it.”

“People can get their news any way they want. What I love about what's happened is that there are so many different avenues, there are so many different outlets, so many different ways to debate and discuss and to inquire about any given news story.”

“The best moderators are the moderators who are essentially invisible. A moderator who is there to be seen and heard and to be talked about either, 'oh, God, what a great question,' or, 'oh, God, what a lousy question,' that to me is a failed moderator.”

“In my case, I was covering politics in Texas as a newspaper man in the 1960's.”

“You want to see an angry person? Let me hear a cell phone go off.”

“No two people see things the same way.”

“I'm a gatekeeper, and the gatekeepers all used to be mostly old, white men.”

“My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been.”

“I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.”

“I came from a family of Marines into the family of Marines.”

“Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That's just my basic view of my function as a journalist.”