Ted Koppel Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I think we're glazing eyes all across America.

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

My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remain just as well-developed as they were before I went.

More than four thousand programs produced and consumed. Some of them were pretty good, a great many of them were forgettable; but a handful may even be worth a book.

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

She's always been by my side when I needed her,

I have been an unabashed fan of NPR for many years and have stolen untold excellent ideas from its programming. It's time to give something back.

I felt a certain amount of embarrassment about doing it (covering the trial) on a regular basis. Every time we did O.J., the ratings went up 10 percent.

For the rest of his life, and I do mean the rest of his life, he always regretted the fact that he had dropped out of school,

What you're talking about is two very different operations. I don't want there to be hint of a suggestion that one operation is better than the other. But in the final analysis, this was a better fit.

He was a warm and loving and surprisingly sentimental man.

I think there is a tendency on the part of some of the cable networks to be in a desperate race to be first with the obvious. Can you imagine going to any one of those people and saying, 'Give us three hours of prime time'? It wouldn't happen.

My mother was born in the year 1899 and I was sitting there on New Year's Day in 1999 saying, 'God, I wish my grandfather had written a book about life in his time,' ... And then I thought, well, maybe I'll try and do it, and initially I sat down to do it more for the family than anything else.

The 10 of us are enormously excited to be at a place that wants nothing more than to produce the kind of television journalism that focuses on issues that matter to the largest number of people. We look forward to creating quality programming that provides the in-depth information for which Discovery Channel is known.

Why? Because those are desperately important issues, and you need to keep reminding the public,

You have lived up to every syllable of that commitment and I thank you.

There is nothing precipitous about this, ... It's time to give a new bunch a crack at this.

Even in his last days, he still filled a room.

At some point, it would probably be time to pull out anyway,

The whole mood of the country has changed,

There were great moments very early on, great moments in the middle and great moments at the end, ... What I'm proudest of is that we've maintained high standards from beginning to end. I don't think we ever let down standards.

I don't know if everyone will give you a fair amount of time, but I promise you I will.

He's moving 2 1/2 miles away into a house he's been building for about three years.

He and I joked the last time I went up to visit just a few days ago that between the two of us we'd put in 83 years at ABC News. ... He was a warm and loving and surprisingly sentimental man.

He and I joked...that between the two of us, we'd put in 83 years at ABC News.

All networks are trying to focus on particular segments of audiences. The emphasis on especially youthful demographics is such that news divisions more and more are focusing on not necessarily less serious stories but they're staying away from some of the more serious stories that Tom and I have tried to specialize in. That is not a restriction we're going to face at Discovery.

The challenge over the years, and the challenge now, is to keep changing the program without altering it,

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I have the necessary lack of tact.

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.

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.

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.

Would anyone else like to say anything nice about women?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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