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We've got a great percentage of our population that, to our great shame, either cannot or, equally unfortunate, will not read. And that portion of our public is growing. Those people are suckers for the demagogue.

Walter Cronkite

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Walter Cronkite
Age: 92 †
Born: 1916
Born: November 4
Died: 2009
Died: July 17
Journalist
News Presenter
Saint Joseph
Missouri
Walter Leland Cronkite
Jr.
Walter Leland Cronkite
Jr
Public
Portion
Read
Portions
Cannot
Unfortunate
Great
Equally
Demagogue
People
Shame
Suckers
Population
Sucker
Either
Percentage
Growing
Percentages

More quotes by Walter Cronkite

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Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.
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News reporters are certainly liberal and left of center.
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I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.
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The perils of duck hunting are great- especially for the duck.
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Television [is] a high-impact medium. It does some things no other force can do-transmitting electronic pictures through the air. Still, as an explored, comprehensive medium, it is not a substitute for print.
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Reagan was an exceedingly likeable guy, just a heck of a nice fellow, despite his politics. He was funny and loved a good joke, the dirtier, I'm afraid the more ethnic, the better. I don't think he brought very much to the presidency, except charisma and success.
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Putting it as strongly as I can, the failure to give free airtime for our political campaigns endangers our democracy.
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And that's the way it is.
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We've always known you can gain circulation or viewers by cheapening the product, and now you're finding the bad driving out the good.
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I never had the ambition to be something. I had the ambition to do something.
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I guess I showed certain signs of being a workaholic in early years I had a magazine route very early on - I must have been about seven or eight years old or something like that - when I was carrying Liberty magazine, trying to win green and brown coupons I eventually [won] a pony.
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When you're bringing in a fairly unknown candidate challenging a sitting president, the population needs a lot more information than reduced coverage provides.
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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.
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I am not a contemplative type, basically. I am much more of an action person and, as a consequence, I look forward to today and tomorrow and what's breaking.
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When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old. Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity.
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Ethics must be reintroduced to public service to restore people's faith in government. Without such faith, democracy cannot flourish. Your ambitious agenda is filling a desperate need.
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It seems to me that instead of cutting taxes, we ought to be increasing the taxes to pay off the deficit, rather than let that thing build up to the point where our grandchildren's grandchildren are going to be paying for our period of time and our years at the helm.
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In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.
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I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since.
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It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.
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