Public Servant Quotes

If you think the system - not you - but if your viewers think that the current political system is working well and serving the interest of our country, then what we're doing will not be attractive.

If you had found the right candidate in 2000 or 2004, and you could have put that man or woman, given them ballot access in September of the election year, they could have won the election.

I think the system is broken; most people think that it's broken. And we think that what we're going to do is invigorate the political system and allow for this country to be turned around.

And when you start talking about the practicality of winning a race like that - you've got to remember we're not talking about winning 51 percent of the vote. We're talking about winning 36, 37, 38 percent of the vote.

And a tiny number of people in a few states make these decisions, and we're left with these options that are increasingly not attractive to the American people.

I went to my son's graduation this weekend, and I heard a great quote I've never heard before from Albert Einstein. It was that the greatest danger to the world is not the bad people but it's the good people who don't speak out.

Unavoidable circumstances prevent me from giving you ample written instructions. Such however as may be deemed necessary will be prepared and sent to you at the City of Washington in a very few days.

The Republic of Texas is no more.

It is only requisite, for me to say to you, that the President places great reliance upon your skill, judgment and intimate knowledge.

This nation can no longer tolerate the autonomous conduct of any single service. A waste of the resources of America in spendthrift defense is an invitation to disaster for America.

The advance guard in the campaign for peace that America wages today must be the State Department.

In the light of the actual fighting that is now in progress, we have reached the point where the military considerations clearly outweigh the fiscal considerations.

Eighty percent of the problems that beset unification immediately disappeared when the President signed the bill increasing the authority and the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense.

I would rather have a competent extremist than an incompetent moderate.

From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one - absolutely no one - is above the law.

The mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks.

The fact that the Arctic, more than any other populated region of the world, requires the collaboration of so many disciplines and points of view to be understood at all, is a benefit rather than a burden.

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was.

Technology has changed the way book publishing works, as it has changed everything else in the world of media.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do.

For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.

First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images.

Filmmakers who use narrators pay a price for taking the easy way: narrated films date far more quickly than films without narrators.

Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.

Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.