I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.

No, I don't think my generation got into this dinosaur thing.

I'm one of the best condensers in the business.

It's always hard, after you've been in command, to take a lesser role.

Part of the new morality of the '60s and '70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability.

Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible.

Dan Rather and I just aren't especially chummy.

We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law and the judicial system to bring the criminals to justice before they have the opportunity to build military forces that use these horrid weapons that rogue nations and movements can get hold of -- germs and atomic weapons.

It is not the reporter's job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts.

I sort of think in a way that many of us young reporters who had the opportunity to go overseas for our organizations were kind of, in a sense, war profiteers. We were enhancing our careers while covering that terrible conflict.

With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.

I'm a romanticist in many ways. I never get behind the wheel of my boat and dropping the anchor without saying to myself, secretly giving my orders to the crew All right, lift the anchor, we're on our way to South Hampton. We're gonna beat them there with this load of tea!

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling civilized? And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

For heaven's sakes, in the newspaper days, when we had competing newspapers, and the newsstands sale was as important as the circulation -- as the agreed-upon circulation, whatever you call that -- in those days, why, gosh, the sensationalism was tremendous.

I think it'd be great if the evening news broadcast, for instance, were unsponsored and unrated.

All through my life, I have never disguised my sentiments about politics in general.

Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.

I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.

I wanted to have more time to play and reflect, but I find retirement more stressful than having a nice, steady job because I have to make decisions about where I want to be.