David Halberstam Quotes

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 about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

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 psychologically, they were separated from their classmates. Events that seemed earth-shattering to them-- for example, who was demoted from the varsity to the junior varsity -- went almost unnoticed by the rest of the students. In many ways they were like combat veterans coming back from a small, bitter and distant war, able to talk only to other veterans.

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 popular you are likely to be.

I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it

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 those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.

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 a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time.

The most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable.

A staff can be no better than the man it serves.

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 press, in this case the L.A. Times.

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 then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.

Physically, rowing was remarkable resistant to the camera... the camera liked power exhibited more openly, and the power of the oarsmen [is] exhibited in far too controlled a setting. Besides, the camera liked to focus on individuals, and except for the single scull, crew was sport without faces.

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.

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 serious novelist.

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 feel like doing them.'

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?

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 to excellence as Otis Chandler did.

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 a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.

In team sports the athletes were bonded by each other, there was an immense peer pressure to keep going. One dared not miss a practice for fear of letting his teammates down. Every time an athlete thought of getting back into bed in the morning he knew he would have to face the anger of his closest friends. But the sculler had to find motivation entirely within himself. No one else cared.

Always stay in with the outs.

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 as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?

Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions.