Top 165 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Brokaw - Page 2

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Tom Brokaw.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.
We were empty nesters, our last-born child having departed for Duke. Meredith decided we needed a dog to fill the vacuum. She heard about a litter in Colorado sired by Chopper, the legendary avalanche dog at the top of Aspen Mountain.
My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.
In our family, where we began with no money, we like to say that we have discovered that God invented money so those who have it can help others. — © Tom Brokaw
In our family, where we began with no money, we like to say that we have discovered that God invented money so those who have it can help others.
I've seen a lot of seasons, change in my time. It's been a very lucky life.
I had four compression fractures in my spine. They were repaired, but it cost me two inches of height.
1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.
Cancer has given me a dose of humility. I'm much more empathetic. It's a club I would rather not have joined, but it is a club.
When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns.
I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.
The greatest rewards of Jerry Ford's time were reserved for his fellow Americans and the nation he loved.
I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.
You will not get a Google alert when you fall in love.
ABC wouldn't be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports.
Everywhere I go - from Main Street to Wall Street - people ask, 'What's happened to our political system? Why can't Washington folks work together?'
We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda's attacks on America launched the nation into three wars - against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.
In one way or another, President Obama's critics will dog him all the way to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and even his admirers will continue to have doubts about his accomplishments if not his promise.
I was still in college when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out.
I'm the father of three daughters, and they're all highly trained professionals. Two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point. — © Tom Brokaw
I'm the father of three daughters, and they're all highly trained professionals. Two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point.
I started writing a journal, and I was learning so much along the way. How to deal with your family, how to deal with your friends.
My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.
I think obviously we need to work harder at extending the women's movement. How do women who have prepared for careers and have a child get back to the workplace and still fulfill maternal roles?
I've been lucky from my earliest memory on. I happened to be born to the right parents, and the lives we led - working class, migratory - suited my personality. I had an adventurous mindset, and we lived on an Army base, then in South Dakota - it was a dynamic environment.
I'm a guy who's had great good fortune in his life. And everything has kind of gone in my direction.
I had good care going. I had Meredith and the family. And I didn't want to become the object of some kind of pity, most of all. I didn't want to show up on the Internet, 'Tom Brokaw has cancer.'
I was on the board of the Mayo Clinic. I was diagnosed there, and I could pick up the phone and get a hold of whoever I wanted to. What I learned is that you really have to get proactive and manage your case.
My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.
Most patients enter a doctor's office or hospital as if it were a Mayan temple, representing an ancient and mysterious culture with no language in common with the visitor.
I'm in remission. I need to get my physical conditioning to a higher level. I was always very fit. I need to get back to where I am very confident in my ability to bike a long way.
There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.
Oklahoma residents are known for not backing down from a fight in the political arena, on the gridiron, NBA courts or rodeo arenas, but in their reaction to the bombing, they knew intuitively they would not find restoration in rage.
The doctor didn't want me to play golf anymore and was worried about me fly-fishing. Golf is something I enjoy, but fly-fishing is a different thing: That's religion. Hunting is religion for me. I didn't want to give those up.
Barack Obama's name will be the one on the peace prize, but his speech and his manner could become a gift for generations to come.
We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.
When you walk into a doctor's office, you've got to have the same attitude you would about anything else. You've got to ask tough questions, and you've got to not be afraid to challenge their credentials.
The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.
Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was, and he didn't require consultants or gurus to change him.
When he entered the Oval Office - by fate, not by design - Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?
Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years - from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 - women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.
Our friend, Timothy J. Russert, was a man who awoke every morning as if he had just won the lottery the day before. He was determined to take full advantage of his good fortune that he couldn't quite believe and share it with everyone around him.
You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.
People are beginning to doubt the moral certitude of people on the right, especially the far right. — © Tom Brokaw
People are beginning to doubt the moral certitude of people on the right, especially the far right.
In 1989, a lone and still-anonymous Chinese student stood unarmed in front of a Chinese tank and gave the world an enduring image of the determination of China's young to change their nation. He didn't text message the tank or share a video on YouTube.
I played high school basketball at six feet, then I went to 5-11 in my 50's, and then, bang, I went down to 5-9.
Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president, died from multiple myeloma. Frank Reynolds, the ABC anchorman, who I had talked to toward the end of his life, not knowing what he had, died from it. Later I found out that Frank McGee, who was the Today Show host, died from it.
My family is not only attractive - I can say that because I'm paterfamilias - but they're really smart, and they're very, very compassionate.
I was a young man working in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1960s when I received a call, and I was summoned to Atlanta to work at WSB. It was, for me, the beginning of a real education about the South.
What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.
One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children.
We don't play the celebrity business in our family.
I've lost seven friends to smoking-related lung cancer. Each death was a long, agonizing experience.
Originally, the main purpose of the convention was to determine who the party would have as the presidential nominee and the vice-presidential nominee.
I am simply the most conspicuous part of a large, thoroughly dedicated and professional staff that extends from just behind these cameras, across this country and around the world, in too many instances, in places of grave danger and personal hardship. They're family to me.
The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva's death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s. — © Tom Brokaw
The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva's death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s.
John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of a single moment.
There are lots of dimensions to being a cancer patient. The overwhelming one is that it takes over your life.
One of the advantages of being a national journalist of some recognition is that you come across high-profile people, and many become your friends.
In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of $100 dollars a week because I didn't feel I could tell Meredith's doctor father I was making less.
The cancer is in remission, and I will shortly go on a drug maintenance regimen to keep it there.
Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa's sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.
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