The Powers That Be Quotes

“One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“she had no fear of the spotlight, only of the places it did not reach.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“He was "more passionate than most intelligent men, and more intelligent and reasoned than most passionate men.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“He was the rarest of things, a Republican with sex appeal.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“All professions have some element of theater to them.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“Nixon under pressure turned only to reporters from publications already favorable to him; Kennedy, in trouble, turned to those most critical and dubious of him, and if anything tended to take those already for him a bit for granted.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“the ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter’s career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“Williams had a very shrewd sense of how much heat the organism could take at any given time;”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“If she was making the right and courageous decisions, he thought, she was nonetheless unhappy and somewhat resentful about doing it”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“particular rootlessness of the society had always lent itself to powerful extremes of both the left and the right, there was, in the volatility and evanescence of the culture an atmosphere ripe for extremism, each side with its own Utopian dreams, each side driving the other to a more polarized position.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be