Tom Brokaw

“We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.”

“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?”

“The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva's death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s.”

“When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns.”

“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.”

“My hope is that we would begin to have a dialogue in this country about the importance of civility. We can have strong differences, but it does seem to me that most of the country believes it's gone to critical mass in what I would call the professional class across the political spectrum - left and right.”

“You will not get a Google alert when you fall in love.”

“Barack Obama's name will be the one on the peace prize, but his speech and his manner could become a gift for generations to come.”

“When you walk into a doctor's office, you've got to have the same attitude you would about anything else. You've got to ask tough questions, and you've got to not be afraid to challenge their credentials.”

“I believe you make your own luck. My motto is 'It's always a mistake not to go.'”

“There are lots of dimensions to being a cancer patient. The overwhelming one is that it takes over your life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.”

“Our obligation at the network is where do we fit into that and how can we best capitalize on that to make sure that our piece of that remains important to those young people.”

“It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.”

“If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.”

“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.”

“Peter, of the three of us, was our prince. He seemed so timeless. He had such elan and style.”

“While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.”