Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Gwen Ifill - Page 2

It's funny, everywhere I go some people ask me whether it's going to be a Latino breakthrough, some people ask me whether it's going to be a female breakthrough, and then I'm reminded that five years ago we didn't even know Barack Obama's name.

Discrimination at any level sends a harmful message to youth, gay or straight alike, and that discrimination has no place in Scouting.

There's five factors or characteristics of places where kids from poor backgrounds don't do very well. And those are places that have more economic and racial segregation, places with more income inequality.

I see a pretty bright line between analysis and opinion. And so, to that end, my goal on Friday nights is to try to assemble the smartest reporters who are available to me that week who have been involved in covering the news.

We used to say in the black community that if somebody else caught a cold, we caught pneumonia.

I certainly don't think Donald Trump suggesting violence in any way.

Mormon leaders said in a statement they will reexamine their ties to the Boy Scouts. "The church," they said, "has always welcomed all boys to its Scouting units regardless of sexual orientation. However, the admission of openly gay leaders is inconsistent with the doctrines of the church and what have traditionally been the values of the Boy Scouts of America."

The questions about Donald Trump temperament were raised - he suggested that the only way to stop Hillary Clinton from appointing judges that they disagreed with is that maybe the Second Amendment folks could handle it.

[It's] Rare for a first lady to be running for president.

Because I would never work for a niche publication or a niche program on television and because I am a journalist and not an opinion person, my job is to try to see how many different points of view I can represent or how. It's not even a question of who you don't offend because you are always going to offend somebody. The question is how can you get people to listen to the information you have to present.

I'm not really good at being predictive, so I guess I'm willing to be surprised.

No parent should be denied from their Scouting - their son's Scouting experience simply because those parents happen to be gay.

All of our panelists are deeply engaged in the topics at hand, so that leaves me free to convene a little dinner party, sans alcohol, and invite the rest of America to listen in.

I think I'm careful. My goal is to try to stay away as much from opinion journalism as possible.

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.

Act right all the time, because someone's always watching.

I knew early on that I wanted to be a reporter, but I didn't know I was a political journalist until my first job in Boston, in the '70s, covering the public school committee at a time when busing was a huge issue. Children's lives were being directly affected by political decisions, and that's when I realized that everything is politics.

Change comes from listening, learning, caring and conversation.

The latest national polls show a tightening in the race to the White House, especially in key states like Ohio and Florida. But when it comes down to it, winning in November [2016] will depend on which candidate has a viable path to 270 electoral votes.

My family was very engaged in the world around us. My father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and an immigrant from Panama. He was deeply involved in civil rights causes, which scared my mother - she was also an immigrant, from Barbados, who had her hands full with six kids, and she worried that my father would get deported. But because of his passion for politics and civil rights, we paid close attention to current events. We would watch political conventions together - for fun!

If you take the same child and put them in two different places, it will dramatically shape the way in which their economic outcomes are realized later in life.

When you are interviewing someone, you have a chance to follow up, to press, to dig in. In a debate there's 30 seconds for the other guy, too. And the goal is to get them to engage with each other, not to engage you necessarily.

I want to see a Republican Party that is a big tent, inclusive party that welcomes all people to be Republicans and to contribute their ideas and support our position of providing opportunity to the American people. And I believe he goes in the opposite direction and deepens the divisions that are so pervasive in our society today.

This is what happens with a breakthrough. The first ones through the door often get bruised if not broken. Eventually, with a little political acumen and racial sensitivity and a lot of hard work, a smooth new place can emerge.

I spent my career trying to speak to the broadest possible audience whether it's in print or whether it's in television.

Our position has never been that people should be forced out of Scouting. We have always said that the values of Scouting are universal they should be welcome to everyone who is willing to live by the Scout oath and the Scout law.

If you take the conflicts we are used to dealing with, race over the years in America, and you combine that with the desire or aspiration to political power or taking power from other people, which is what politics is all about, you end up with a lot more friction than you would normally see with just straight-ahead politics.

I'm not in love. I'm not out of love. I'm just trying to find some version of the truth.

I find that those who voted for George W. Bush are less offended by his religious references, and those who voted for Bill Clinton did not seem offended at all when people prayed at his inauguration.

In the media universe we're in, where there are people screaming on one end, there is no problem at all with having a little bit of extra politeness.

I actually think agendas are more often found in State of the Union speeches than in inaugural speeches.

It's never too late to move to a good place to try to improve your child's outcomes in adulthood.

Barack Obama didn't get elected president, would never have been elected president, had he decided to run as a black candidate. In order to reach the broadest number of people you have to speak to their interests as broadly as you can.

People are always surprised when they see me speak live that I have a sense of humor. And I say, Well, you know, there's not much opportunity to laugh when you're reporting the dread news of the day.

One of the unwritten rules in a presidential news conference is that he'll answer questions. If he chooses not to, there's not much you can do about it other than make yourself look like an idiot screaming, which to me is counterproductive.

Even marginal progress could be affected by investigations in Little Rock and in Washington.

We needed someone to recognize the importance of check and balances, accountability, transparency. There was a real systemic problem at South Carolina State, a problem that has gone on for 25 or 30 years

I'm not quite certain how you can force a candidate to stick by the rules.

I don't think that Donald Trump represents the traditional Republican values and heritage of my party. That's one reason that I don't support him. The Republican Party has always revered the individual. We led the way in abolishing slavery, for example, and we recognize the dignity and worth of every human being. it is clear that Donald Trump, by his derogatory comments, by his mocking of the most vulnerable people in our society, by his marginalization of ethnic and religious minorities, doesn't reflect the traditional Republican values.

It's not surprising that you wouldn't see that side of me on television, but in real life I find the world to be quite a funny place.

I just think we as consumers of information media must be very clear what it is we are consuming. Whether we are choosing to get our information by listening to people fight about it. Or whether we're choosing to get it by listening to the facts or watching the facts as they're laid out and then reaching our own conclusions. It's very different ways of info gathering, but it's not all journalism.

Poor children in Baltimore face even worse odds than low-income kids elsewhere, mostly because they remain in impoverished neighborhoods.