Most journalists now believe that a person's privacy zone gets smaller and smaller as the person becomes more and more powerful.

No matter what name we give it or how we judge it, a candidate's character is central to political reporting because it is central to a citizen's decision in voting.

Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.

The written tone and the spoken tone change and the reporters' disbelief in the veracity of the government spreads to the readers and the viewers.

In exchange for power, influence, command and a place in history, a president gives up the bulk of his privacy.

But the time has come for journalists to acknowledge that a zone of privacy does exist.

The relationship between press and politician - protected by the Constitution and designed to be happily adversarial - becomes sour, raw and confrontational.

And what it depends on, of course, is whether the story itself is worth the ethical compromise it requires and whether the competition is onto the story.

Journalists, who are skeptical to begin with, simply do not like to be lied to or made fools of.

The ethics of editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and 80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry.

The networks found themselves having to compete for an increasingly Balkanized audience.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

Traders and Surfers both have to deal with feelings of missing out on the small ones, until the big one comes along. They also have to deal with feelings of staying with the big one.

Pyramiding instructions appear on dollar bills. Add smaller and smaller amounts on the way up. Keep your eye open at the top.

The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.

Can it be that action is active resignation? Something is trying to develop; it moves ever so slightly, and there comes your man of action and bashes in the hothouse windows.

O do not weep, she says, for ages past I was and I endure

Every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies.

Good taste shouldn't have to cost anything extra.

Remember that pain has this most excellent quality. If prolonged it cannot be severe, and if severe it cannot be prolonged.