Ed Bradley Quotations

Be prepared, work hard, and hope for a little luck. Recognize that the harder you work and the better prepared you are, the more luck you might have.

I will not go into a story unprepared. I will do my homework, and that's something I learned at an early age.

I'd watch my father get up at 5 o'clock and go down to the Eastern Market in Detroit to do the shopping for his restaurant, and get that business going and then go out on his vending machine business.

My mother worked in factories, worked as a domestic, worked in a restaurant, always had a second job.

And I always found that the harder I worked, the better my luck was, because I was prepared for that.

I stayed three weeks in Paris, fell in love with the city, and decided that I was born to live in Paris.

The people in your life are important. Meaningful relationships with those people are very important.

I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.

So I just got on the phone and the engineer just patched me in and I did reports. I'd get a community leader and bring him to the phone, call up the station and do an interview over the phone with the guy.

You know, I think I still have a sense that no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, no matter how much success you have, no matter how much money you have, relationships are important.

I had a lot of fun in Cambodia, much more so in Cambodia than Vietnam.

I taught sixth grade for three and a half years.

There was no one around me who didn't work hard.

You can work hard to sharpen your talent, to get better at whatever it is that you do, and I think that's what it comes back to.

I had no experience with broadcasting basketball games, so I took a tape recorder and went to a playground where there was a summer league, and I stood up in the top of the stands and I called the game.

Probably my mother. She was a very compassionate woman, and always kept me on my feet. And I think part of it is just the way you are, the way you're raised. And she had the responsibility for raising me.

Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things.

My uncle was a hero, Lewis Roundtree. He was not even related to me really, but he was always called my uncle. He was like a father to me. I was closer to him than I was my father.

I would listen to how they told the story, to what elements they used, to how it sounded, and that's who I patterned myself after, the people who were on CBS News.

And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events.

But you know, I always said that no one else on my block was on the radio, and it was fun.

I did anything that would get me on the air.

I had never been out covering a story, but boy, was that fun.

I knew that God put me on this earth to be on the radio.

I made the decision to come back to New York, quit my job and move to Paris.

That's when I hit the ground. So in the instant that that round landed and blew me in the air, I had those separate and distinct thoughts. The guy who was standing right next to where I had been standing had a hole in his back I could put my fist into.

I think, in some ways, Michael Jackson is out of touch with reality, and I don't think he has people around him who can say, Michael, can't do this. Michael, you can't do that. Michael, you can't say this. You know, I think he has been so big for so long that he can do whatever he wants to do.

The Paris peace talks kept a roof over my head and food on the table and clothes on my back because if something was said going in or coming out, I had the rent for the month.

The only thing I'd ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio.

As a child, I loved to read books. The library was a window to the world, a pathway to worlds and people far from my neighborhood in Philadelphia.

One panel after another found that agencies were giving conflicting information to the president.

I worked to save up enough money to pay off my bills and have enough money to live for a little while, and then I moved to Paris.

It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us.

When you're in a tournament, that's what you're looking to do?

We were the first and thank God we're still ticking. We were the first at what we did, the first newsmagazine program. Today, the television landscape is littered with them.

We were the first and thank God we're still ticking, ... We were the first at what we did, the first newsmagazine program. Today, the television landscape is littered with them.

When we lost the competition, we lost the public will to continue,

The report has not answered all our questions.

Then I learned how to do wraparounds and things like that. I had no experience.

Because when it gets to the point where it's not fun anymore, I've always hoped that I would have the courage to say goodbye and walk away from it.