Bob Edwards Quotations

Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.

Nobody cares about your wardrobe, what your tie looks like, or even if you're wearing one, and I don't.

When Solomon said there was a time and a place for everything he had not encountered the problem of parking his automobile.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.

Never exaggerate your faults, your friends will attend to that.

The pictures are created by the listener, with a little help from the broadcaster. The pictures are perfect. If you're showing pictures, different things in that picture can distract from the spoken word.

At a tiny station in New Albany, Indiana, which is right across from the river from Louisville, Kentucky, where I grew up. The Louisville stations were loath to hire beginners, so I had to go across the river.

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

I was encouraged to read aloud in class and vocalize.

If you want anything done well, do it yourself. This is why most people laugh at their own jokes.

I think we're doing the right things for the right reasons. We're not doing it to sell products. We're not doing it to be popular. We're doing it because in our judgment these stories are important to do, and at this length and this much depth.

In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.

In my case, the listener is often in an automobile driving to work. You can concentrate on the road while still getting an audio message that can be riveting.

That's the problem with news interviews, you work your tail off to get prominent figures in the news on the radio, but once they've been on, the event passes, the urgency, the issues you talked about evaporate.

People are always ready to admit a man's ability after he gets there.

The radio was my pal. I was just crazy about it.

Between 2 and 5 I'm reading in to find out what's been going on while I've been asleep.

I got to know every format of every station and who was on and what time.

I used to listen to the soap operas with my grandmother.

I wanted to be one of the voices in the box.

I'm a very straight-laced, conservative news kind of guy.

I've never been able to predict the future of anything.

It's also a more personal medium. It seems to go directly to one's brain. There are no pictures to distract.

Any outfit that has to beg its listeners for money is an organization that has to constantly please its listeners or it will dry up and go away. It shouldn't work when you think about it.

I'm still excited at being at a microphone and talking to listeners. I love that. It's the most basic element of what I do and I still enjoy it very much.

Some are pre-taped interviews because maybe we can't get that person live or maybe we're not sure it's going to work out right so we tape it an hour in advance.

We're going to have a lot of money against us. But we'll see how people respond and where they want the town to go.

The difference between a friend and an acquaintance is that a friend helps; an acquaintance merely advises....

Meanwhile, the meek are a long time inheriting the earth.

I go home by noon, and I'm in bed by 6 p.m. I get up at 1 and do it again.

One trouble with being efficient is that it makes everybody hate you so.

If blue collar jobs are leaving and white collar jobs are outsourced what color collar jobs are left?

Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.

I wake about 1 a.m. I'm in the office by 2 a.m. We're on the air at 5.

With radio, the listener absorbs everything.

Public radio has always been so powerless.

Murrow would be delighted that there are 24-hour news channels, but disappointed that during prime time all that they would be doing are these shout shows and Larry King instead of doing the news,

I don't know that anybody really knows what our water situation is here, and I think that's really frightening.

I can do whatever I want to. I'm completely independent. NPR over the years began taking itself enormously seriously -- as it should. In the end I was so micromanaged that they were telling me how to pronounce syllables of words.

I bet it has been 15 years. Those times are gone.

I go home by noon, and I'm in bed by 6 p.m. I get up at 1 and do it again.

The people that show up here are wanting a job, they are wanting to get back into society. The problem is that society hasn't frequently let them back in.

It has a lot of historic value, a lot of sentimental value.

That was just thugs sitting there, not elected officials, ... somebody who affected everybody's life, not just the lives of other criminals.

You know what the compensation is before you decide to run.

We've been getting questions about them, mostly from people who worry we're wasting money. But in the long run, I think the new signs will be cheaper.

Where do you think I am going to get my morning news? Good Morning, America ?

With consolidation you have fewer and fewer voices, ... I always thought that the strength of radio was its diversity. It has always had so many voices. When I was a kid, the maximum amount of radio stations that you were allowed to have in your ownership group was five. Now you have one company that owns 1,250 stations. That's just wrong.

We all know what to expect before the season starts. As parents, we make a commitment also. The family gets involved.

I should be able to get by on that money until my friend wires me some more cash.

I wake about 1 a.m. I'm in the office by 2 a.m. We're on the air at 5.

Once we get this push over with at the end of the year, I-44 will be what we consider in good shape border to border.

It looks like the fire was obviously intentionally set.

They want to give me a program, so I can continue to host and be heard every day instead of occasionally, as I would have been at NPR.

These voices came out of the box, as well as music and news and drama. You still had the soap operas on the radio in those days.

This is clearly just pettiness directed at me, ... It baffles me that they are going to these petty extremes, especially when I am still an outspoken supporter of public radio and NPR specifically.

I was 3 in 1950. And I loved the radio.

I met (Franklin) Roosevelt once on the back of a train,

If you walk in and say that we want you to hire ex-felons ... the answer is probably 'no,' ... But when you get them here and they are seeing them face-to-face, they're seeing them as human beings. And that breaks it down, and some real positive things can happen.

For one thing, you can get old, fat, bald and nobody knows and nobody cares. So there's great longevity in radio, more security there.

You can't find a decent place to live around here, and finding work isn't easy either.