African Americans

"There have been a number of gains, a number of, I think, token results. But far too many people, both black and white, are still locked out of the system and don't have the opportunity to reach toward those goals that many of us take for granted."

"He created a spirit in this country that caused people to feel, at least for a little while, that there was some hope that things could be better. Needless to say, there was a percentage of the population that did not agree and thought things would be better if he were not around."

"I know there was so much talk in school about my daddy and people were afraid to talk to me. They thought I was stuck up. They didn't know me, had never talked to me, but just because I was Martin Luther King's daughter, I had to be stuck up and I wouldn't be able to talk to them."

"To be perfectly honest, it has had its handicaps. The thing is that people judge you by your parents' and people expect me to be just like daddy and mother. Therefore, I can't run across the street or anything."

"I think blacks are definitely moving together. This is good, because in order to have any movement, you've got to have togetherness. But I also feel that because of the way society is now, we cannot get along without the white man. And the way it is now, he cannot get along without us...We've got to go to the roots of it and just change the whole society - that's why I don't believe in what some people say about having a black state and a separate black nation."

"I think basically the youth of today are just having so many problems and they are sort of confused...This is their method, of escaping...Just like I sleep to escape my problems."

"I guess people don't understand that I'm just a person."

"Don't tell me! Don't tell me!"

"Well, I wish they had built a Funtown for colored."

"I want to ask America: What does crow taste like? Because y'all are eating it."

"I'll Call the President. President, we need the National Guard! We need as many men as you can spare! Because we are killing the Patriots! So call the dogs off! Send the National Guard, please!"

"You do have your teammates behind you: your fullback and your halfback, and that’s only because they have to be."

"Watching D. Jack of the Eagles, his play is horrible; he dropped 2 TDs and several other catches, plus he's chicken and wants no part of contact. Eew."

"The CBS crew had arrived: Ed Bradley; his producer, David Gelber; and a cameraman. The 60 Minutes people had government permission to work on other stories in Beijing, but they went first to Shanghai as tourists, which gave them cover to work on the real story. Ordinary Chinese did not recognize Ed Bradley as a television star as he walked down the streets of Shanghai."

"Ed Bradley was the legendary 60 Minutes reporter."

"Ed Bradley was an African American journalist who was best known as a correspondent on CBS's 60 Minutes. In recent years, he became a broadcast icon on that Sunday evening television show."

"All across America, thousands of est graduates, Forum participants, Erhard employees, and other faithful acolytes — not to mention countless others who may have remembered only vaguely the man with the strange-sounding name of Werner Erhard — watched as 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley related a dark story of Erhard's past."

"60 Minutes has been on the air since 1968, and reporters such as Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Andy Rooney have been with the show for many years. The late Ed Bradley was a very popular reporter on the show."

"Ed Bradley was much honored by his peers, the best honor always to receive, from those who judge harshest and judge best. It is very appropriate that Ed Bradley would be honored here in the halls of the Congress of the United States. Perhaps he was destined to be honored in any case, because he was a pioneer, a first of his kind. We are still in an era when the first blacks are coming forward and we honor them simply for piercing the iron veil of race, but we honor Ed Bradley in this Chamber today as a leader of his profession."

"Ed Bradley is a member of an elite group of CBS News professionals who have mastered a variety of duties and who have been honored on many occasions for their abilities."

"The ticking seconds announcing the start of 60 Minutes signal the end to another weekend. Hearing the clock is a weekly reminder there are only a few short hours left in Sunday and that another work week is about to begin. Seeing the distinguished and debonair Ed Bradley is the only thing I like about this show."

"For nearly forty years, Ed Bradley dedicated his life to journalism and uncovered some of history's greatest stories. His legacy, his life's work, is a story for all of us to admire. Ed was a man of journalistic integrity, he not only set a high standard for his fellow journalists; he also helped to break down barriers in a field that traditionally has not reflected the true diversity of our Nation."

"Known best for his investigative reports on the CBS news program 60 Minutes, Ed Bradley won 19 Emmy Awards throughout his journalism career, including one for lifetime achievement in 2003."

"Ed Bradley was a CBS and White House correspondent before becoming a Sunday night fixture on 60 Minutes."

"Bradley joined CBS's 60 Minutes as coeditor in the 1981–1982 season. He also anchored and reported special broadcasts on 60 Minutes II. Bradley's first full-time work in television was as a war correspondent for CBS News during the Vietnam War. … He has received numerous Emmy Awards for his work, one for a 1981 interview with Lena Horne."

"Most of us know Ed Bradley from his 25 years of work on the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, and his many interviews with world figures, celebrities and cultural icons. The men and the women who sat in the chair across from Bradley doing his 60 Minutes interviews were figures of importance, people to whom we should pay attention, and we could rely on Bradley to make sure that no skeleton in the darkest corner of his subject's closet was safe from the tenacious journalists."

"In addition to valuable contributions to journalism, Bradley's reporting also spurred social activism, but also spurred change with his reporting on AIDS in Africa, Death by Denial, which helped influence drug companies into discounting and donating AIDS drugs to Africa."

"In 2000, Ed Bradley celebrated his nineteenth season as co-editor of and correspondent for 60 Minutes. … He covered presidential campaigns and national conventions from 1976 through 1996 for CBS."

"Ed Bradley has remained a part of the CBS news team where he has garnered numerous awards on the popular 60 Minutes news magazine television show."

"I learned this from Mike Wallace. Listen, be a good listener. You don't have to fill space. Just sit there and listen."

"Aretha Franklin was tough. She turned out to be good, but she was, you know, she was -- she's a very -- she's a very wonderful, but in some ways, shy woman. You don't think about that when you see how she emotes and performs."

"I've always said when I die and if I do get to the pearly gates and St. Peter says, what have you done to deserve entry, I'd ask him if he'd saw my piece. It's always been a favorite of mine."

"People know that they can tune in to "60 Minutes" any Sunday and know that they're going to learn something by watching the broadcast. They may not like every piece, they may not agree with every piece, but they'll say, huh, I didn't know that about something in there."

"I think the evening news broadcasts are very different today than they were 25-years-ago. I think that the advent of 24-hour cable television. You don't have to wait for 6:30 or 7:00 to get the national news. You can turn on cable any time and you're going to get it right away. And I think that that 24-hour continuous news cycle has affected the way that news is covered. And I'm not sure that that's always a good thing. It can be, but it's not always a good thing."

"Before, when I was covering the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, we used to have what I call the three Ss. You would shoot a story, you would script a story, which is to write it and then ship the story. And if you were in Cambodia you'd go to the airport and try to find a pigeon to carry it out for you. Someone who was leaving Cambodia to go to either Bangkok or Saigon or Hong Kong because there wasn't the satellite technology. There was no uplinks then. Today, the second major change is also in personnel. Today you have so much satellite coverage you can report live why from a battlefield. Before you were often there just by yourself. Now you're likely to be with 20 other reporters. I just think there's more people out there covering the same story and covering it in a very different way because of the technological advances."

"Morley has a gift for doing the kind of story that you think only Morley could do, or that certainly Morley could do better than anyone else."

"I will not go into a story unprepared. I will do my homework, and that's something I learned at an early age."

"And I always found that the harder I worked, the better my luck was, because I was prepared for that."

"Mr. President, this is Ed Bradley in New York. There are many people who would question our system of criminal justice today in the United States--in fact, many people who have lost faith in our criminal justice system. With so many people languishing on death row today for so many years, how can you say with such assurance that justice will be certain, swift, and severe?"

"Who was the role model, the living example of what the est Training could do? Who else but Werner Erhard, a man some of his employees say, thought of himself, as god."

"In a nutshell, Erhard's message was this: If you are in a rut, the problem isn't your parents, your boss or the system, it's you. Take responsibility, Erhard said, and you can transform your life overnight."

"Since the 1970s some seven-hundred-thousand people have signed up for a self-improvement called 'est', or as it's now called 'The Forum.' Est was the brainchild of a former used-car salesman named Jack Rosenberg. Back in the sixties, Rosenberg deserted his wife and four children in Philadelphia, changed his name to Werner Hans Erhard, and moved to California where he started another family, and, came up with the idea for est."

"(Any favorite Mississippi or Louisiana authors you’d like to recommend?) There are so many: Ernest Gaines, Natasha Trethewey, Donna Tartt, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Robert Olen Butler are just a few I love."

"I was never threatened…I never knew anyone who was lynched. But there was subtle racism every day of my life. You could not speak to a white man unless he spoke to you first. On the sidewalk, I’d have to move so a white person could walk by."

"All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened."

"When people hear stories, they identify more closely with the characters. When I read aloud, people always come up to me and say, “I understand it much better now that I’ve heard you read it. I can hear the characters’ voices much clearer…”"

"In dialogue, I’m dealing with the sounds I’ve heard. One of the reasons I often write from first person or multiple points of view is to hear the voices of different characters. Omniscient narration becomes a problem because, for me, the omniscient is my own voice narrating the story and then bringing in characters for dialogue."

"I would think a faith in God is one thing. I think that if we could change the whole world and keep the land is another thing. Change things yet keep keep the relationship is another thing."

"I think I'm a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don't only believe in God, I know there's God."

"King is probably one of three men of this century that I'll call heroic. A fantastic man as far as I'm concerned, for all that he did."