Carl Bernstein Quotations

The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; it's broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.

In the John Paul II days, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had the advantage of staying in his cupboard - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - exchanging views only with the Pope, and speaking publicly only through carefully written missives on doctrinal issues.

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.

The great thing about Watergate is, is that the system worked. The American system worked. The press did its job. We did what we were supposed to do.

Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides rules and services and safety measures that contribute to a better society.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.

The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.

John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans.

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees - famously in recent years at 'The Washington Post,' 'The New York Times,' and the three original TV networks.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.

The most important ethical issues and the most difficult ones are the human ones because a reporter has enormous power to hurt people.

There's no way to know the motives of another person totally, even a person that you know very well.

If you are a great news organization, you can't have the best obtainable version of the truth if your vision and your scale is reduced to a fraction of its former self.

Even at the end of a presidential election campaign, we have no way to know what Mitt Romney really believes.

The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; its broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.

There's something totally crazy about this.

Religion is one of the fundaments of Hillary Clinton's character and politics.

At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell's secretary? Why won't anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face.

Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we, too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

Hillary [Clinton] is neither the demon of the right's perception, nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time perhaps more old-fashioned than modern.

The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.

June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?

Increasingly, the picture of our society as rendered in our media is illusionary and delusionary: disfigured, unreal, out of touch with reality, disconnected from the true context of our life. It is disfigured by celebrity, by celebrity worship, by gossip, by sensationalism, by denial of our societies

What will a Hillary Clinton presidency look like? The answer by now seems obvious: It will look like her presidential campaign, which in turn looks increasingly like the first Clinton presidency. Which is to say, high-minded ideals, lowered execution, half truths, outright lies (and imaginary flights), take-no prisoners politics, some very good policy ideas, a presidential spouse given to wallowing in anger and self-pity, and a succession of aides and surrogates pushed under the bus when things don't go right. Which is to say, often.

Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.

You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line.

Our news organizations and our reporters should be going after the best obtainable truth, not the sensational, on-the-surface truth ... But instead of going after the truth, we look through the lens of how much it will cost and of those who would like us not to tell the truth.

We had very little time -- Bob and Felt in the garage together had very little time to have meetings and conversations in the course of a couple years. The object was to get as much information, as much context, as much certainty of things we had obtained elsewhere,

We had no idea of his motivations. And even now some of his motivations are unclear.

Beyond this, I can only give you my personal assurance that our sole motivation in working on 'The Final Days' was to report the truth: neither money nor any preconceived disposition regarding Mr. Nixon was a factor in our reporting.

During the past year, he'd pressed Woodward to tell him the name, arguing that the current editor should know the identity of our source. Woodward had resisted.

the best obtainable version of the truth. It's a simple concept, but difficult to do.

Not on a paper run by a media conglomerate, ... And the public may not react with the same indignation.

You know, one of the things about Watergate and one of the things about the Nixon presidency is that it just keeps going. It never ends,

The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information, misinformation, misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.