Top 80 Tom Brokaw Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?’

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.

Originally, the main purpose of the convention was to determine who the party would have as the presidential nominee and the vice-presidential nominee.

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?

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

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.

The cancer is in remission, and I will shortly go on a drug maintenance regimen to keep it there.

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.

When I read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I was so struck by the universality of small towns.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There are lots of dimensions to being a cancer patient. The overwhelming one is that it takes over your life.

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 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’m a guy who’s had great good fortune in his life. And everything has kind of gone in my direction.

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.

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

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.

I’ve seen a lot of seasons, change in my time. It’s been a very lucky life.

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.

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.

I had four compression fractures in my spine. They were repaired, but it cost me two inches of height.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now.

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

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.

The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.

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.

The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva’s death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s.

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.

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.

1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People are beginning to doubt the moral certitude of people on the right, especially the far right.

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.

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