David Brinkley

A man can seldom – very, very, seldom – fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say

I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.

Since when is “public safety” the root password to the Constitution?

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.

It’s so much easier to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

If we were all just alike, one of us wouldn’t be necessary.

Life is trying things to see if they work.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Every success is the mother of countless others.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)

Look beyond the individual to the cause of his misery.

I just want people to take a step back, take a deep breath and actually look at something with a different perspective. But most people will never do that.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

If I was on the air and was just kind of a plain-vanilla personality that took the safe road and the safe way trying to please all of the people all of the time, I’d been gone in two weeks.