Top 165 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Brokaw

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Tom Brokaw.

Last updated on December 23, 2024.

Thomas John Brokaw is an American retired network television journalist and author. He first served as the co-anchor of The Today Show from 1976 to 1981 with Jane Pauley, then as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for 22 years (1982–2004). At this position he was one of the "Big Three anchors" along with Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. In the previous decade he served as a weekend anchor for the program from 1973 to 1976. He is the only person to have hosted all three major NBC News programs: The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, briefly, Meet the Press. He formerly held a special correspondent post for NBC News. He occasionally writes and narrates documentaries for other outlets.

American - Journalist | Born: February 6, 1940

Source: Wikipedia

Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now.

Tom Brokaw

Peter will have a place in this brotherhood forever.

Tom Brokaw

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

Tom Brokaw

In Gerald Ford, the man he was in public, he was also that man in private.

Tom Brokaw

I'm not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science - and then learn to write.

Tom Brokaw

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

Tom Brokaw

As young parents of three girls, living in California during the late Sixties and early Seventies, Meredith and I couldn't help but be aware of the rising level of dialogue, debate, commentary, and proclamations about the place of women in society and about how to raise females in light of this raised consciousness.

Tom Brokaw

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.

Tom Brokaw

Judy Miller is the most innocent person in this case. I really thought that was outrageous that she was jailed and we needed as journalists to draw a line in the sand in a strong but thoughtful way.

Tom Brokaw

The response to 'The Greatest Generation' and the books that followed has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.

Tom Brokaw

What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.

Tom Brokaw

In your pursuit of your passions, always be young. In your relationship with others, always be grown-up. Set a standard, and stay faithful to it.

Tom Brokaw

TV is a fickle business. I'm only good for the length of my contract.

Tom Brokaw

In the seasons of life, I have had more than my share of summers.

Tom Brokaw

I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.

Tom Brokaw

Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.

Tom Brokaw

Peter, of the three of us, was our prince. He seemed so timeless. He had such elan and style.

Tom Brokaw

David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph.

Tom Brokaw

I was at MSNBC; I was constantly saying to them during Bridgegate, 'You've convicted Governor Christie without one iota of fact attaching him to the decision to stall the traffic on the bridge. Why don't we wait until the federal government or the state government... completes its investigation.'

Tom Brokaw

Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.

Tom Brokaw

Don't overstate Fox News. It's still much smaller than the least of the network niches.

Tom Brokaw

I'm a working journalist. I'm interested in all points of view, and I draw conclusions based on facts, not just on opinions.

Tom Brokaw

We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.

Tom Brokaw

If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.

Tom Brokaw

My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.

Tom Brokaw

It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.

Tom Brokaw

What I think is highly inappropriate is what's going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS News that's quite outrageous.

Tom Brokaw

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

Tom Brokaw

There's a lot of arrogance in the medical community. There are good, reliable websites you can go to for information - the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins.

Tom Brokaw

I guess the issue that I have with all the news organizations that have a political MO, if you will, attached to them is that they sometimes jump to conclusions about what this will mean. Get ahead of themselves.

Tom Brokaw

I'm not going to sit on the porch of the old anchorman's home with a drool cup.

Tom Brokaw

I've interviewed presidents and royalty, rock stars and movie stars, famous generals and captains of industry; I've had front row seats at Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games; my books have been on best-seller lists, and my marriage is a long-running success.

Tom Brokaw

While attendance at traditional churches has been declining for decades... the evangelical movement is growing, and it is changing the way America worships.

Tom Brokaw

Peter is an old friend. I'm heartbroken, but he's also a tough guy. I'm counting on him getting through this very difficult passage.

Tom Brokaw

My hope is that we would begin to have a dialogue in this country about the importance of civility. We can have strong differences, but it does seem to me that most of the country believes it's gone to critical mass in what I would call the professional class across the political spectrum - left and right.

Tom Brokaw

I had gone to all the big stories of the '80s, which was one of the most fertile times in American journalism, around the world and here as well.

Tom Brokaw

Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.

Tom Brokaw

I think they are paying a lot more attention to news now, by the way, in part because of national-security issues. A lot of young people have friends or family in the military today.

Tom Brokaw

In Los Angeles, I had the good fortune of anchoring the news right before Johnny Carson came on, so to see him, the Hollywood stars watched me first.

Tom Brokaw

Our obligation at the network is where do we fit into that and how can we best capitalize on that to make sure that our piece of that remains important to those young people.

Tom Brokaw

You convey something that the public either trusts or it does not trust, and it has to do with the content and how you handle the news, but it also just has something to do with your persona.

Tom Brokaw

I have no problem whatsoever with a kind of political overview or an ideological overview for any of these outlets as long as it's transparent. We know where Breitbart stands, we know where Fox stands, where MSNBC stands. So, people go in with an understanding of that.

Tom Brokaw

The real test of an anchor is when there's a very big event. Sept. 11 is the quintessential example of that, and that day it took everything that I knew as an anchor, as a citizen, as a father, as a husband, to get through it.

Tom Brokaw

Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.

Tom Brokaw

You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world.

Tom Brokaw

After 50 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, my father died, too young, of a massive heart attack. He was 69. It's almost certain that all those years of nicotine inhalation were a major contributor to his clogged arteries.

Tom Brokaw

You will not solve global climate change by hitting the delete button.

Tom Brokaw

It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.

Tom Brokaw

I think people of my generation became journalists - you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers - because we wanted to report the big stories.

Tom Brokaw

During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.

Tom Brokaw

The most memorable interviews for me are folks whose names I don't know: young civil rights leaders in the South, showing great courage as they walked into a town in the dark of night. A doctor working for 'Doctors Without Borders' in Somalia, operating by kerosene light in a tent. Those are the kinds of people that linger in your memory.

Tom Brokaw

What I think is that Fox has done a very smart job of carving out their place.

Tom Brokaw

I believe you make your own luck. My motto is 'It's always a mistake not to go.'

Tom Brokaw

While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.

Tom Brokaw

The conceit of an anchorman is we never think we're going to die, I suppose.

Tom Brokaw

The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything - meals, jobs, clothing.

Tom Brokaw

Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck.

Tom Brokaw

I don't like to play the macho card, but I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class culture.

Tom Brokaw

I had fractures in my spine that had to be repaired that came as a big surprise; nobody warned me that I might get some really severe, threatening fractures. It was painful, and I lost two inches of height, bang!

Tom Brokaw

I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I'd say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.

Tom Brokaw

Top 165 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Brokaw

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