American Journalist Quotations | Page 7

That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.

I was going to be an English teacher.

You can't take sides when you know the earth is round.

We mostly feel fearful because we feel powerless. We feel powerless, I contend, because of a style of thinking that splits information in two poles that makes us lose all the operative information we need to solve the problem.

We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

The discoveries of how we can grow and the insights we need to have really come from the inside out. To have genuine empathy, not as a make-nice tool but as an understanding, is essential to the next step.

What you have is two men seeking the White House; they're both products of prominent New England families. They both went to private boarding schools. They both went to a prestigious university.

Consultant: any ordinary guy more than fifty miles from home.

I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.