Top 44 Jake Tapper Quotes

I can be fairly boring.

There’s a long tradition in this country of questioning generals.

I lost a great uncle in World War II who was with the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Print and television journalism are very different, and it’s not like one is better than the other.

I’m not a particularly good liar.

I think that I’m doing my job, and it’s nice to be recognized, but I also know that a lot of the people who are happy with me now are not going to be happy with me in four to eight years and that I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing.

Nastiness and mockery and meanness sometimes seem as if they’re spreading like a contagion.

I have a wife and a son and daughter. What do I need to do to make their lives better, happier? What can I do in terms of my time or my attention given that I am very busy at work? That’s a personal rule of thumb I live by from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed.

If the Trump White House and their allies in the media want to have this conversation about decency, I welcome them to the table to talk about it. But there’s a bunch of stuff that they need to get caught up on before we get to a comedian at the White House dinner.

There’s no bias when it comes to facts, and there’s no bias when it comes to decency.

Facts matter a great deal to me.

Equating brutality and despotism with leadership is not an American value.

It’s not empirically wrong to say that Washington isn’t working for the American people and Washington does too many things for powerful special interests and it’s broken.

My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.

I’m quite calm when all is well.

I tried to do a comic strip. I came close, and I met with Universal Press Syndicate in Kansas City, but ultimately, they did not go with my strip.

I do breakfast first, which is a small bowl of oatmeal and some sort of protein, like hard-boiled eggs. And then I work out – 40 minutes of cardio and maybe some strength training.

Exercise has its hazards. Runners are sidelined by shinsplints, freestylists by swimmer’s ear, and who hasn’t heard of tennis elbow? But the fitness buff of the ’90s has a far greater worry. StairMaster Butt.

Politicians don’t like tough coverage, and their protectors try to destroy the messengers.

The Patriots cheat. This is just a fact as established by investigations. They’re a cheating team.

It is empirically indecent to make fun of the disabled… That’s just indecent.

We all know members of the House and Senate – especially the House – who are just crazy and say things that aren’t true, Democrats and Republicans.

I’ve conditioned myself to believe that almonds are a completely delicious snack, and that they don’t taste like paper or get stuck in the back of my mouth.

It’s the exact opposite of my job to take what the government says at face value and say, ‘This is the truth because the government says it, and the government never lies.’

I get a lot of heat from the Left, which is bizarre. I get a lot of heat from the Right, too, but the vitriol is from the Left.

It matters to people that the president tell them the truth.

There are a lot of good writers in TV!

What would McCarthy, what would Nixon, what would Bill Clinton have done if they’d had Twitter?

You know what takes effort? Being kind, being patient, being respectful, telling someone how you feel politely instead of just avoiding them for six weeks.

There are basic lines of human decency, norms to which society generally agrees and to which we adhere, and we continue to see the Trump presidency eroding these lines.

You know what takes effort? Being kind. Being patient. Being respectful.

It took me years to realize I wanted to be in journalism.

I’m trying to spend less time with the phone when the kids are awake in general. I need to get better about that. It’s a perennial New Year’s resolution.

People mess up. They say things when their guard is down.

My journalistic heroes are Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel and Tim Russert and Edward R. Murrow, among others, because they were tough.

My job is not to be liked. My job is to tell the truth.

It’s tough for me to draw myself – usually way too self-critical.

I don’t want to compare President Obama and President Trump on these issues, because they’re different, and the scale isn’t even remotely the same. But President Obama said things that weren’t true and got away with it more for a variety of reasons, and one is the media was much more supportive of him.

My job is to not take for granted when somebody says, ‘Oh, this is all just a made-up, phony scandal,’ or, ‘What this person did put the U.S. government at risk.’

I definitely pack coffee if I’m going someplace where it might not be available. When I went to Afghanistan in 2011, I brought a bunch of instant coffee. I didn’t need to do that, of course, because army people drink industrial-strength coffee and have it going 24/7.

Normally, at a debate or a town hall, I would be quick to say to someone, ‘That was rude,’ or, ‘We’re going to try to keep it civil here,’ or, ‘Let’s not have personal attacks.’

Trump is most fun to draw – just a great mash of caricature-able features, from bouffant to eyebrows and scowl, to the high cheekbones and the regal pride.

Mean is easy. Mean is lazy. Mean is self-satisfied and slothful.

My job is to be skeptical: skeptical of people like Edward Snowden and skeptical of the U.S. government.