Top 55 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Scheer
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Robert Scheer.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column.
I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.
I have broken a lot of stories.
Even with the best of intentions, even when they're very smart and knowledgeable - as opposed to George W., who is neither - it doesn't seem to matter.
We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It's just garbage. It's insulting to the readers.
When Howard Dean started saying some honest things, they hung him.
For instance, Clinton who was unquestionably the smartest of the bunch I talked to - both the ones who made it and didn't. He had a great interest in policy.
They know that the column resonates in the community. They know that people like it, and yet they don't have room for one column once week that consistently got it right.
I've been with the paper for almost 30 years.
The decision came from the publisher. It certainly was cleared by Chicago. And then they come out with these fine sounding words about relation to readers and their obligation. It has nothing to do with that.
The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.
So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.
Well, what happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.
I talked to Reagan for about six hours all told. and Reagan was willing to go along with it. He didn't look at his watch, and he didn't allow his campaign aides to cut it off.
For example, I spent a lot of time with Reagan, both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras, I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.
Much of what candidates have to do is raise money and appeal to constituencies or interest groups that can provide that money.
And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.
What Clinton severed with his welfare reform was the obligation of the federal government to step in when the states failed and to monitor these programs.
I was able to do something that people can't do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.
The publisher has told - you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative.
What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise.
It had run as a column - I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.
The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.
That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened - it's just been intensified.
I happen to be one of those in the antiwar part of things who actually supported Bill Clinton when he sent the cruise missiles in to take out bin Laden. I had thought we had the right to use Special Forces to go in for bin Laden. He had attacked American embassies. He attacked ships. And so, I didn't see any need to coddle the Taliban.
Today anyone on the Internet can find out more about what you read, think, and earn than the secret police of Stalin or Hitler could have learned.
I've never met any strong critic of the United States anywhere in the world who gave us any credit for having limit on government.
The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.
George W. Bush is a person who is totally disinterested in the world, uneducated. I'm not saying he's stupid. I don't think he's stupid. He's crafty as hell, but he projects well on television. And that's the real big problem. He is the perfect "what, me worry?" president.
Richard Nixon even before becoming president, before meeting Henry Kissinger, he said, "This is ridiculous. Communism is nationalist. The Chinese and Russian and Yugoslav and Cuban and - none of these communists get along, and the Koreans and the Vietnamese, and we can do business with them." And then he opened up to China, and that's when the Cold War started.
It takes no courage to make war, particularly if you're not going to go and your children are not going to go.
We think the Republicans are the ones who started this fundamentalist religion claptrap, you know? It was Jimmy Carter. He's the one who talked about, you know, "I'm a born-again Christian. I pray all the time. I do this," etc.
Life is a horror for the Korean people. And I think isolating them further is going to make life more miserable.
If the war on terror is endless, you could forget about democracy.
Eisenhower provided the first break in the Cold War, by bringing Khrushchev to the United States, in humanizing the Soviets; and then Nixon, by making the opening to China; and then Reagan, even meeting in Reykjavik with Gorbachev and acknowledging that nuclear weapons are a horror. So I won't accept that Republicans just escalate. Republicans, at least when they were more moderate, they were maybe even more isolationist, they sometimes brought sanity to the debate. We don't have that now. We have - all these Republicans have gone off the neoconservative deep end.
Everybody says, "Well, if it's a democracy, let them have nuclear weapons." America is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons. We're the only ones, this democracy, our great democracy.
The great enemy of any totalitarian regime is normalization and trade.
There's a problem of terrorism in the world. There's always been terrorism. There will be terrorism. You have to deal with it surgically. You have to deal with it in a serious way.
The publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point, but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.
He [Reagan] likes to tell jokes and that's why he told the ethnic joke that got him into some trouble. Perhaps if reporters didn't overreact to a politician's telling the very same joke they routinely hear and tell in the city room, we'd get more humor.
I happen to love America. I love this freedom and democracy. The fact is we are the ones who killed innocent people, men, women and children, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, weapons that should have never been used, should have never been developed in the first place, you know?
Alternative media is no longer really alternative, and we're no longer that dependant upon newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, for our information.
We've had the trivialization of our politics going on ever since we had electronic media.
The terrorists are going to believe the worst about America. They think we spy on everything. They think we kill everyone. They think - they don't believe that we believe in democracy, right? They don't believe we have limits on our government.
I was able to do something that people cant do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.
Boycotts don't work. They work in certain isolated situations, where you have some potential. But in the main, the best way to bring about freedom in a society is to normalize, have tourism, have trade, have contact.
The journalist's job is to get the story by breaking into their offices, by bribing, by seducing people, by lying, by anything else to break through the palace guard.
Eisenhower was a pretty peace-oriented president. Truman was a pretty hawkish. I would argue, if we had more time, I would argue Truman had a lot to do with getting the Cold War going.
At least 3% of the signers of the Constitution must have been gay, since that's the low estimate for any population sample. It was probably higher, given that they were a pretty talented bunch and wore wigs.
The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the "tough love" callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.
I think it's very important to follow the lead of the South Koreans and the Chinese and not back North Korea even further into a corner, because that's when they'll be dangerous.
We pick governors from states where governors don't do anything, like Jimmy Carter from Georgia, George W. Bush from Texas.
Democrats can give us wars, you know? Democrats can play the false patriotism card.
Nuclear weapons are inherently threatening to all of civilization. If that had been a nuclear weapon at the World Trade Center, even the most primitive kind of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you wouldn't have a Manhattan. There wouldn't be a democracy of any kind in America.
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