All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees - famously in recent years at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the three original TV networks.

The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.

The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.

You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line.

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism.

Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; its broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.

I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.

Life has ill-prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers.

Change must Needed.

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

We have come from a time of the large-scale, planned, Al Qaeda-style attacks, to the encouragement of lone wolves: Fort Hood, Chattanooga. To the encouragement of people to act on their own.

If the legends fall silent, who will teach the children of our ways?

It's not an insult to have a past and to have some accountability to it.

I don't remember, at 19, someone giving me a golden key and saying, 'Welcome to Hollywood; which job would you like?'

My goal is to try to be as happy as I can - going through every day just as it is.

In our pledge every day, we pledge one Nation under God with liberty and justice for all.