Theodore White

When that book came out, it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella.

There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it’s wonderful.

A liberal is a person who believes that water can be made to run uphill. A conservative is someone who believes everybody should pay for his water. I’m somewhere in between: I believe water should be free, but that water flows downhill.

When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he’s nobody’s friend.

Those 40 or 50 national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps – they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers.

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

With the end of the nominating process, American politics leaves logic behind.

Quality in a classical Greek sense is how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy.

I’d get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories.

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.

If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you’re free – however free one can be on this planet.

The best time to listen to a politician is when he’s on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he’s exhausted. Then he doesn’t lie.

When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.

I class myself as a manual laborer.

He who is created by television can be destroyed by television.

Politics in America is the binding secular religion.

For those men who, sooner or later, are lucky enough to break away from the pack, the most intoxicating moment comes when they cease being bodies in other men’s command and find that they control their own time, when they learn their own voice and authority.

I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.

His passion has aroused the best and the beast in man. And the beast waited for him in the kitchen.

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.