Top 165 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Brokaw

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Tom Brokaw.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
Tom Brokaw

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.

Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now.
Peter will have a place in this brotherhood forever.
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.
In Gerald Ford, the man he was in public, he was also that man in private. — © Tom Brokaw
In Gerald Ford, the man he was in public, he was also that man in private.
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.
It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.
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.
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.
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.
The response to 'The Greatest Generation' and the books that followed has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.
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.
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.
TV is a fickle business. I'm only good for the length of my contract.
In the seasons of life, I have had more than my share of summers. — © Tom Brokaw
In the seasons of life, I have had more than my share of summers.
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.
Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.
Peter, of the three of us, was our prince. He seemed so timeless. He had such elan and style.
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.
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.'
Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.
Don't overstate Fox News. It's still much smaller than the least of the network niches.
I'm a working journalist. I'm interested in all points of view, and I draw conclusions based on facts, not just on opinions.
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.
If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.
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.
It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not going to sit on the porch of the old anchorman's home with a drool cup.
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.
While attendance at traditional churches has been declining for decades... the evangelical movement is growing, and it is changing the way America worships.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.
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.
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.
You will not solve global climate change by hitting the delete button.
It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.
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
I think people of my generation became journalists - you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers - because we wanted to report the big stories.
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.
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.
What I think is that Fox has done a very smart job of carving out their place.
I believe you make your own luck. My motto is 'It's always a mistake not to go.'
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.
The conceit of an anchorman is we never think we're going to die, I suppose.
The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything - meals, jobs, clothing.
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.
I don't like to play the macho card, but I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class culture.
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!
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.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!