Wolf Blitzer Quotations

If you are a reliable, honest journalist, sources will open up and trust you and share good information.

My rule of thumb is that if I am interested or intrigued by something, others will be as well.

My inclination, as an old-school, classically trained journalist, is not to go with a story unless I have it hard. It's not good enough to say something based on rumors that were flying around.

When I finished grad school, I sort of fell into journalism. Someone mentioned that there was an entry-level job at the Reuters News Agency. I applied, and, to my amazement, I got the job.

I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor.

I'm a season ticket holder to the Washington Wizards, and I love going to Washington Nationals and Redskins games.

My best stories come from well-placed sources who point me in the right direction.

My goal is to make the viewer a little bit smarter.

Two hours on television just doesn't automatically happen. I'm up early, I'm reading newspapers online, talking to my staff, coming up with ideas.

Almost every day I wrap up my two-hour live broadcast and I say to myself as I'm driving home, 'I wish I would've done this' or 'We really should have gone live longer with this segment.

I eat right. I exercise. I run 5 miles a day on the treadmill.

I love covering stories that have huge historic impacts.

There are millions and millions of patriotic Muslim Americans.

Mr. President, haven't you been watching the news? Katrina hit New Orleans five days ago. The city is flooded. Many people are homeless, desperate for food and water. They're wondering why it's taking so long for the government to send help.

Now we can't say right now if there's any letup in this, because we don't see it yet,

I didn't dig it out. It was given to me.

I am told that there is very little hope, but that they wanted to wait two weeks, ... Late Edition.

I don't understand, I really don't understand, how in the most sensitive areas of your counterespionage, et cetera, you don't have better procedures in place to be making certain that people are living up to the highest standards and that this has gone on as long as it has,

Forty-three percent of the U.S. population believes there is too much freedom in the press. Twenty-two percent of the U.S. people believe government should censor newspapers.

What does the Levy family want to hear from Gary Condit Thursday night?

I will work enthusiastically for any of the non-Lieberman eight who might get the nomination.

You call them rebels, ... I call them by their names: They are killers, they are convicted killers, they are terrorists.

What we have said, and we said it in the report, we have numbers of Iraqis who tell us that Saddam was committed to acquiring weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons,

Walter Cronkite is still Walter Cronkite, and when he tells you a story, you just are going to listen. I wanted to make sure his voice is heard, since he was there. I just think he's got a powerful story to tell.

Why are you advertising so much of the U.S. intention and giving the Iraqis that potential advantage?

What I would emphasize is that he called this morally reprehensible, ... I think it's largely making a mountain out of a molehill.

We try to use all of our resources without making it too busy or crazy out there, ... I'm sensitive to how this is going to play in Peoria, how average viewers -- say, my uncle, who may not know what Google is -- might respond.

We go to a helicopter flying over New Orleans, where they're narrating what they see -- there are people trapped on a roof somewhere. Then we bring in Tom Forman, who used to be a reporter in New Orleans. We're looking at satellite maps of the city, comparing this with video feeds that come in, then we'll zoom in on Google Earth, see what's nearby -- a university, Lake Pontchartrain -- and all of this together delivers the story in a richer, more immediate way.

Everybody in the world should know that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,

Everybody will watch this trial live on television.

Are you talking tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars? Give us a ballpark,

They all say there's a chance, a small chance, that it could become a killer of humans. It could mutate from human to human. It's something we have to focus on.

So much is not being done for these people,

This decision is based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script.

They're looking forward to a strong working relationship,

it is unlikely that there will be any substantial progress toward a final settlement without active American leadership and participation.

It's like bringing viewers inside our control room and allowing them to move through all of that raw, incoming information with us,

It is time for the United States, as the sole recognized intermediary, to consider more forceful action for peace. The rest of the world will welcome this leadership.

Dan was playing a role of newsman, that he was conscious of this, whereas the other two appeared to be more the third-party reporter.

It's very easy to obtain police uniforms, military uniforms, ... You go to a surplus store, and you get all you want.

The issue is not whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction, the issue is whether or not the Iraqi government has made a decision that the game is up and it will comply with the United Nations resolutions,

The fact they are voting is positive, but it is still a tenuous situation.

In the Security Council, there is understanding that if Hans Blix ... were to be approached by the Iraqis that they need a little extra time for the civilian activities, the Security Council might give them a little bit extra time,

He asked me not to use her name saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment.

Government workers get a bad rap. It's important to recognize them and what they do.

And hovering over all of this is the threat of terror. There are people out there who hate us. They are plotting 24/7. These guys are patient and spend a large amount of time between attacks planning.

You want to revise and amend those words, senator?

And in the interests of full disclosure, that NARAL ad did run here on CNN. But since NARAL yanked it, it's not running on this network, obviously, anymore. We are running the Progress for America ad defending John Roberts against such attacks. We should also note that NARAL had told us and other news organizations that its ad was running on Fox News Channel and we reported that, but a Fox spokesman tells us that NARAL never approached Fox to buy any airtime.

The committee found significant shortcomings in almost every aspect of the intelligence community's human intelligence collection efforts against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction activities. In particular, that the community had no sources collecting against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after 1998. Most, if not all of these problems stem from the broken corporate culture and poor management, and it will not be solved by additional funding and personnel.

The police were also ready with more formidable tools of intimidation. The office also assigned a veteran homicide prosecutor to oversee the investigation. All this activity sent a signal to Condit. If he didn't play ball, he might find himself called to testify before a grand jury under oath.

You see a lot over 30 years and you try to be professional and responsible. A lot of the interviews you do can be very haunting.

I think what we try to do is bring the news to our viewers in a very comprehensive responsible way.

You tell the people the stories the best you know. If there is something you don't know, you be up front and make that clear. You always give the aggrieved party the chance to respond before you publish or go to air. That's just my kind of old-fashioned news values.

The fight against radical Islamic terrorists and ISIS has been called the war of our time.

Six days after 9/11 George W. Bush visited a mosque and said quote, "Islam is peace."

You don't suppose that the photo ops and the military convoys arriving at the same time were a coincidence, do you, Wolf ... Situation Room.

Americans are clearly more afraid than at any time since 9/11. In Los Angeles, 650 schoolchildren didn't go to - 650,000 schoolchildren didn't go to school because of an e-mail threat, this two weeks after an attack killed 14 people in San Bernardino.

The war against ISIS will pose many new challenges for the next commander-in-chief. The last two presidents [George W. Bush and Barack Obama] pursued a Middle East policy that supported toppling dictators to try to promote democracy.

No Republican has ever been elected president of the United States without winning Ohio.

You have to be precise. You have to be specific, but you want to be accurate. That is first and foremost. You want to be on top of the story, but words do matter.