Walter Cronkite

“America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

“I think being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause - but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it's a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists; that is, if they carry it into their journa”

“Helping set the day's agenda and deciding what we used and editing it, that was a journalistic high point. I liked reporting as well. Just doing the news - the live performance - wasn't important. Working on the desk was.”

“The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.”

“I simply told people what I thought about the state of the war in Vietnam, and it was that we better get out of this.”

“I record it here today to establish my early predisposition to editorial work - to be both pontifical and wrong.”

“Dan Rather and I just aren't especially chummy.”

“I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.”

“I did not believe that the public was sophisticated enough to understand that a newsman could wear several hats and that we had the ability to turn off - nearly, you can't say perfectly, but nearly - all of our prejudices and biases.”

“I worry that we're not getting enough of the news that we need to make informed judgments as citizens.”

“Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.”

“The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programmes have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings.”

“It's hard for us to really understand the immensity so far of the conquest of space.”

“I'm a liberal, but I'm not biased. Seriously.”

“History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.”

“Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough.”