Top 208 Quotes & Sayings by Walter Cronkite

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Walter Cronkite.

Last updated on November 21, 2024.

Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962–1981). During the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. Cronkite reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombings in World War II; the Nuremberg trials; combat in the Vietnam War; the Dawson's Field hijackings; Watergate; the Iran Hostage Crisis; and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King Jr., and Beatles musician John Lennon. He was also known for his extensive coverage of the U.S. space program, from Project Mercury to the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle. He was the only non-NASA recipient of an Ambassador of Exploration award. Cronkite is known for his departing catchphrase, "And that's the way it is", followed by the date of the broadcast.

American - Journalist | November 4, 1916 - July 17, 2009

Source: Wikipedia

With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.

Walter Cronkite

I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got.

Walter Cronkite

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

Walter Cronkite

I think it'd be great if the evening news broadcast, for instance, were unsponsored and unrated.

Walter Cronkite

History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.

Walter Cronkite

Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.

Walter Cronkite

I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since.

Walter Cronkite

I do not consider a liberal necessarily to be a leftist.

Walter Cronkite

The very first time a politician puts you in his target is sometimes a disappointment, because perhaps you thought you were friends and getting along well... But it is not something that you dwelled on. At least, I did not.

Walter Cronkite

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.

Walter Cronkite

I haven't quite got the hang of this retirement thing.

Walter Cronkite

And that's the way it is.

Walter Cronkite

I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.

Walter Cronkite

A lot of the questions raised about television's power and influence on events have applied throughout history to every mass-communications medium - most particularly print, because that's the medium we've had the longest.

Walter Cronkite

Advertising's always been a considerable pressure on publishers.

Walter Cronkite

It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace.

Walter Cronkite

Dan Rather and I just aren't especially chummy.

Walter Cronkite

Part of the new morality of the '60s and '70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability.

Walter Cronkite

There were a few youthful fishing trips, but I never enjoyed the experiences, partly because I didn't like hurting the bait.

Walter Cronkite

With all this dolling up and featuring of the news, it's getter harder and harder just to get the facts of the story.

Walter Cronkite

Anchormen shouldn't cry.

Walter Cronkite

When you're bringing in a fairly unknown candidate challenging a sitting president, the population needs a lot more information than reduced coverage provides.

Walter Cronkite

We all have our likes and our dislikes. But... when we're doing news - when we're doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we're doing the daily news, covering politics - it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.

Walter Cronkite

I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.

Walter Cronkite

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

Walter Cronkite

Perhaps if all the peoples of the world understand what war really means, we would eliminate it.

Walter Cronkite

I do think that the success, although still not complete... in the recognition of equal rights... to all Americans, regardless of color, creed and so forth, was also one of the best stories we've had to report.

Walter Cronkite

Under the Constitution, giving 'aid and comfort' to a wartime enemy can lead to a charge of treason.

Walter Cronkite

If every small nation with a border dispute believes they can go ahead and launch a pre-emptive war and that it will be approved by the greatest power, that is a very dangerous thing.

Walter Cronkite

There's a little more ego involved in these jobs than people might realize.

Walter Cronkite

We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law and the judicial system to bring the criminals to justice before they have the opportunity to build military forces that use these horrid weapons that rogue nations and movements can get hold of - germs and atomic weapons.

Walter Cronkite

For heaven's sakes, in the newspaper days, when we had competing newspapers, and the newsstands sale was as important as the circulation - as the agreed-upon circulation, whatever you call that - in those days, why, gosh, the sensationalism was tremendous.

Walter Cronkite

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.

Walter Cronkite

I learned early on that in the real world, the masks of tragedy and comedy adorn the proscenium of every life.

Walter Cronkite

I am joining the hundreds of thousands who shall be marching in the Virtual March on Washington to Stop Global Warming in order to demonstrate the concern that we all hold for the future of our planet and all the living things - flora, fauna, human and animal - that exist upon it.

Walter Cronkite

I hope that, somewhere, Mom and Dad are proud that little Walter is performing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Walter Cronkite

The successful landing on the moon, very probably, is the best story.

Walter Cronkite

I worry that we're not getting enough of the news that we need to make informed judgments as citizens.

Walter Cronkite

It's a little hard not to be an elitist when you're making millions of dollars a year.

Walter Cronkite

I looked at the world with the humaneness, I think, which is one of the hallmarks of being liberal in my mind.

Walter Cronkite

I'm so tired of stories starting, 'Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.' You've got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven's sake. Everybody doesn't have to be an O. Henry.

Walter Cronkite

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

Walter Cronkite

It's hard for us to really understand the immensity so far of the conquest of space.

Walter Cronkite

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

Walter Cronkite

A liberal to me is one who - and it suits some of the dictionary definitions - is unbeholden to any specific belief or party or group or person, but makes up his or her mind on the basis of the facts and the presentation of those facts at the time. That defines what I am.

Walter Cronkite

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.

Walter Cronkite

A journalist covering politics, most of us are aware of the necessity to try to be sure we're unbiased in our reporting. That's one of the fundamentals of good journalism.

Walter Cronkite

We have overcome some terrible blows to our democracy, to the future of our democracy, to the future of our nation. We survived the Civil War and the strife that tore this nation apart.

Walter Cronkite

Arianna Huffington has exercised her renowned wisdom to give journalism another boost along the ever busier Internet. Her blog site promises to be an interesting challenge for those of us lucky enough to be invited to participate with our occasional contributions.

Walter Cronkite

The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programmes have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings.

Walter Cronkite

I record it here today to establish my early predisposition to editorial work - to be both pontifical and wrong.

Walter Cronkite

I had as much time to prepare for that moon landing as NASA did, and I still was speechless when it happened. It just was so awe-inspiring to actually be able to see the thing through the television that was a miracle in itself.

Walter Cronkite

I think cameras ought to be everywhere the reporters are allowed to go. I think, furthermore, reporters and cameras ought to be everywhere that the Constitution says the public can go.

Walter Cronkite

The military people don't like it; the government probably doesn't like it, but the people should know what they're sending their young people into when they permit their governments to declare war and engage in war.

Walter Cronkite

The whole period of the '60s changed a lot of us; there was never a decade like that in American history... to have the decade capture one of the great accomplishments of this century: man landing on the moon.

Walter Cronkite

America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.

Walter Cronkite

The perils of duck hunting are great - especially for the duck.

Walter Cronkite

In the early stages of our involvement in Vietnam, basically I felt that our course was right. My concern grew with the concern of the American people.

Walter Cronkite

Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.

Walter Cronkite

I can swear on a stack of Bibles that not once in doing the 'CBS Evening News' for 19 years - well, I take it back. Once perhaps. But during 19 years, with perhaps one exception, was I ever aware of any political or commercial pressure on that broadcast whatsoever.

Walter Cronkite

Top 208 Quotes & Sayings by Walter Cronkite

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