Ted Koppel Quotes

In the days of Caesar, kings had fools and jesters. Now network presidents have anchormen.

Aspire to decency. Practice civility toward one another. Admire and emulate ethical behavior wherever you find it. Apply a rigid standard of morality to your lives; and if, periodically, you fail ­ as you surely will adjust your lives, not the standards.

Pessimists calculate the odds. Optimists believe they can overcome them.

Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder; it is a howling reproach.

It becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia.

Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

Set your sights beyond what you can see. There is true majesty in the concept of an unseen power which can neither be measured nor weighed.

There's harmony and inner peace to be found in following a moral compass that points in the same direction regardless of fashion or trend.

There is no more respected or influential forum in the field of journalism than the New York Times. I look forward, with great anticipation, to contributing to its op-ed page

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead.

What Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions, they are Commandments. Are, not were.

To face despair and not give in to it, that's courage.

If we're able to identify our own ignorance, we can identify someone else's expertise. We learn how to listen to each other. And that is the foundation of human understanding.

People shouldn't expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the 'fringe' media.

Journalism has become a sort of competitive screeching: what is trivial but noisy and immediate takes precedence over important matters that develop over time.

Donald Trump is, in effect, the Recruiter-in-Chief for ISIS. ISIS wants nothing more right now than to have the world divided into Judeo-Christian on one side and the Islamic world on the other. That's exactly what Trump is doing for them. I think it's time we start with thinking about what ISIS wants and then not doing it.

There is something very very special, universal and easily identifiable among all Jews; it is beyond territory, it is something we all have in common

Well, Keith Alexander, the former director of the NSA wants to say every company in the United States falls under one of two categories, those that have been hacked and those that don't yet know it.

President Carter famously said the hostages were the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing he thought about at night. It was a downright foolish thing to say, because it made the people holding the hostages realize that they had an awful lot of influence over the United States.

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

The responsibility that I feel is to do as good a job as a journalist as I can possibly do.

I have been an unabashed fan of NPR for many years, and have stolen untold excellent ideas from its programming.

Emotions get in the way but they don't pay me to start crying at the loss of 269 lives. They pay me to put some perspective on the situation.

Every single of us is going to be saying, "Thank God, finally, an interesting convention." But you're right about all those people out there. All the people who have been energized by the Trump campaign are going to be very, very angry folk if they think that Trump is not well treated.

And there will continue to be a specific threat, and there will continue to be terrorism, as there has been for as long as human history exists.

My function is, as objectively and accurately as I can, to present reality to people out there, and doing that as quickly as we do is quite difficult enough, thank you.

The problem is everybody is worrying about explosive vests and people with AK-47s. We live in a day and age when someone sitting in Somalia or in Chile or in Perth, Australia, can be sitting there with a laptop and can theoretically take down one of our power grids or part of our infrastructure and do infinitely more damage. Nobody talks about that. It's not a question of who comes into the United States. We're way past that.

Terrorism is simply the weapon by which the weak engage the strong.

They don't want to get dirty and they know that Trump loves this kind of thing. And your polls, and yours are what's giving them the material that they need, it's the oxygen that the Trump campaign requires, a poll every three or four days showing him where he is.

I have the necessary lack of tact.

But the irony is they think they're being tough on ISIS and Trump thinks he's being tough on ISIS. Senator Rubio in his interview with you touched on it very, very lightly.

Going after ISIS, it's beautiful, I like it.

Look, fundamentally there are two sets of questions that apply in the war against terrorism. The one set of questions deals with the, "Where is it going to happen? What's going to happen? When is it going to happen?" The other set of questions deals with, "What is it that our enemy, the terrorists, are trying to achieve?" What are they trying to induce us to do?

Would anyone else like to say anything nice about women?

A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure regime change even before he took power in January 2001... It has been called a secret blueprint for US global domination. ... A small group of people with a plan to remove Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush was elected president. ... And 9/11 provided the opportunity to set it in motion. Not since Mein Kampf has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed years ahead of the blow.