Walter Cronkite

Walter: The perils of duck hunting are great ― especially for the duck.

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

Walter: When you're bringing in a fairly unknown candidate challenging a sitting president, the population needs a lot more information than reduced coverage provides.

Walter: We're not defending a precious right of our own - a freedom of speech, a freedom of the press. What we're defending is the people's right to know.

Walter: This opens the door on another chapter of history.

Walter: Be kind to an old man.

Walter: It's my belief that we should get out now.

Walter: I don't think those things live forever with the public. They're more likely to live with us journalists than the public itself.

Walter: I've gone from the most trusted man in America to one of the most debated.

Walter: I suppose my children; my grandchildren are the high points of pleasure. I enjoy the usual things- the theater, relaxation, my tennis games, sailing.

Walter: The great sadness of my life is that I never achieved the hour newscast, which would not have been twice as good as the half-hour newscast, but many times as good.

Walter: There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

(About meeting his wife, Betsy)
Walter: And, I immediately saw this beautiful redhead in our midst, couldn't wait to meet her.

Walter: I think somebody ought to do a survey as to how many great, important men have quit to spend time with their families who spent any more time with their family.

Walter: I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got.

(About landing on the moon)
Walter: There's a foot on the moon! Wow! Oh boy! Hot diggity dog! Yes sir!

(About retiring from CBS evening news)
Walter: Twenty-four hours after I told CBS News that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday I was already regretting it and I've regretted it every day since. It's too good a job for me to have given it up the way that I did.

Walter: In broadcasting, I learned the hard way how prepared you need to be to be spontaneous.

Walter: I learned at an early age how to pontificate even when wrong.

(About retiring from CBS evening news)
Walter: Those who have made anything of this departure, I'm afraid, have made too much.

(About the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg)
Walter: I wanted to spit on 'em, and I'm not a spitter.

Walter: In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.

Walter: And that's the way it is.

Andy Rooney: (On a 1982 episode of Late Night with David Letterman) He's so good to be with..I don't know about that 'most trusted man in America stuff'. He's the most fun to be with. He's just easy, he thinks of things to say, he's a good guy. I like him. As a matter of fact he has a corny sense of humor. I was covering the Nurenberg trials. He came in, having been out one night and he rolled up this big marble staircase and got to the top. There was this big fish tank about the size of this desk at the bottom. He lowered a thread down with a pin on it, trying to catch a goldfish swimming around in the tank. Now how does that fit your image of Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America? Don't tell that goldfish that!