"Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people."

"[A]ll achievement should be measured in human happiness."

"You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers."

"A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ...Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting."

"The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence."

"If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe."

"The ideal of the omni-competent, sovereign citizen is ... a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment. At the root of the effort to educate a people for self-government there has ... always been the assumption that the voter should aim to approximate as nearly as he can the knowledge and the point of view of the responsible man. He did not, of course, ever approximate it very nearly. But he was supposed to. It was believed that if only he could be taught more facts, if only he would take more interest, if only he would read more and better newspapers, if only he would listen to more lectures and read more reports, he would gradually be trained to direct public affairs. The whole assumption is false ... No progress can be made towards this unattainable ideal. This democratic conception is false because it fails to note the radical difference between the experience of the insider and the outsider ... No device of publicity, no machinery of enlightenment can endow [the outsider] during a crisis with the antecedent detailed and technical knowledge which is required for executive action. The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd."

"What women want is what men want. They want respect."

"A fool is someone whose pencil wears out before its eraser does."

"To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."

"A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night."

"If your head tells you one thing and your heart tells you another, before you do anything, you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart."

"The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depth."

"Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses."

"The original answer defines certain conditions, [...] Anything else is a different question."

"Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent."

"What is the essence of America? The essence of America is finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from.""

":Very much. I'm of Arab background."

":Now, are you familiar of the history of that region, and what took place?"

":—and America and everywhere else. Why push people out of there who are lived there for centuries? See?"

":So the Jews— You're saying Jews should go back to Poland and Germany."

":Poland. Germany.—"

":Where is home?"

":They could go home."

":So where should they go? What should they do?"

":Remember, these people are occupied, and it's their land, not German and not Poland's."

":Ooh. Any better comments than that?"

":Tell 'em to get the hell out of Palestine."

":Any comments on Israel? We're asking everybody today, any comments on Israel?"

";David Nesenoff"

"I mean, they (Obama admistration) have a guy like Dennis Ross at the White House now, who's always been a part of the Israel lobby. They put him in charge of the whole Muslim world."

":The Zionists."

":Who's they?"

":I think American policy is pro‐Israel. If you take a vote in Congress, maybe you might get five people vote against any further aid to Israel or to continue its occupation. But that's about it. They control— They have vast power."

";Helen Thomas"

"I'm a liberal, I was born a liberal, and I will be a liberal till the day I die."

"You don't spread democracy through the barrel of a gun."

"Get into the game!"

"Well it wasn't a formal hanging. It was kind of subtle. I had covered him … his first press conference. He dropped down into the press room and started taking questions and everyone asked about the tax cut and I sort of — Ari Fleischer later told me I blindsided him because I said to him, "Mister President, why don't you respect the wall of separation between church and state?" Well, there's a video of him that is so funny. He jerked back as if he had been hit! I mean both barrels! And he said, "I do respect—" I said, "Well if you did, why would you have a religious office in the White House?" (I'm exaggerating, but anyway) and "you're a secular official." And he said "I am secular." Well, anyway, I got a call from Ari after that. After that there was a formal news conference and I did ask him a Middle East question and it wasn't the question per se. They just don't like my boorishness."

"Both Blair and Bush have been found lacking in their credibility. Usually by this time a government would have fallen. I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate."

"Every President hates the Press. Every president thinks that all information that comes to the White House is their private preserve after they all promise an open administration on the campaign trail, but some are even more secretive than others. Some want to lock down everything."

"It's the arrogance of power. "We're in charge. It's our White House. What the hell are you doing here?" Basically toward the Press. "How dare you question anything we do?" They don't understand that the presidential news conference is the only forum in our society where a president can be questioned. If he's not questioned, he can rule by edict; by government order. He can be a monarch. He can be a dictator, and who is to find out? No. He should be questioned and he should always be able to willingly reply and answer to all questions because these aren't our questions. They're the people's questions."

"We've got to break through the wall of secrecy. It's America's fate."

"[I]t took a lot of chutzpah on the part of a lot of newspaper women who came here in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties to break down the barriers against women reporters. And we couldn’t even become members of the National Press Corps until 1971 — that’s pretty late in the game. We got the vote, which we should’ve been born with, in 1920. Everything we’ve had to struggle for — it’s ridiculous."

"I don't speechify. I know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that's what I ask. But they get mad at the straight line. I just want to ask a tough question."

"This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history."

"All presidents rail against the press. It goes with the turf."

"At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up... My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? …"