Carl Bernstein Quotes

24 quotes in 524 categories

• The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives…
• We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath…
• June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington…
• At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after…
• The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness…
• The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we, too often are squandering…
• The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented…
• You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line.
• The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving…
• Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
• Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.
• Increasingly, the picture of our society as rendered in our media is illusionary and delusionary: disfigured, unreal, out of touch with reality, disconnected from the…
• For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.
• All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees - famously in recent years at 'The Washington Post,' 'The New York Times,'…
• Even at the end of a presidential election campaign, we have no way to know what Mitt Romney really believes.
• In the John Paul II days, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had the advantage of staying in his cupboard - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the…
• John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a…
• Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides…
• Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
• The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

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