David Halberstam Quotes

26 quotes in 522 categories

• Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it
• Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and…
• Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
• These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.
• There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't…
• With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a…
• If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.
• QUESTION: Do you know what the greatest test is? ANSWER:Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?
• Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy…
• Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.
• What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.
• The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism…
• Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the…
• If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were…
• No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it…
• One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less…
• There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and…
• Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions.
• Rowing, particularly sculling, inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football…
• During their college years the oarsmen put in terrbily long hours, often showing up at the boathouse at 6:00am for preclass practices. Both physically and…

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