Tom Brokaw Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

They weren't perfect. They made mistakes. They allowed McCarthy-ism and racism to go unchallenged for too long.

Tom Brokaw
Pearl Harbor led us into a great war and out of a great depression. This new war on terrorism will be fought less conventionally, and it could lead us into a deep recession.

Tom Brokaw
It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

Tom Brokaw
This is the greatest generation any society has ever produced.

Tom Brokaw
A common lament of the World War II generation is the absence today of personal responsibility

Tom Brokaw
The heady, sweet aroma of marijuana frequently permeated the air. As thick as the smoke were the four-letter words that suddenly were everywhere.

Tom Brokaw
On the embarrassment of having called the presidential election of 2000 too early:
We don't just have egg on our face. We have omelette all over our suits.

Tom Brokaw
The meaningful role of the father of the bride was played out long before the church music began. It stretched across those years of infancy and puberty, adolescence and young adulthood. That's when she needs you at her side.''

Tom Brokaw
The World War II generation did what was expected of them. But they never talked about it. It was part of the Code.

Tom Brokaw
I guess it is the physical and cultural remoteness of South Dakota that compels everyone to memorialize almost every South Dakotan who has ever left the state and achieved some recognition. As a child I would pore over newspapers and magazines, looking for some sign that the rest of the world knew we existed.

Tom Brokaw
The failure of goodwill, and of a willingness to find common ground in a country that in election after election is so evenly divided, is a disgrace.

Tom Brokaw
There on the beaches of Normandy I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives were laced with the markings of greatness.

Tom Brokaw
My father, Red Brokaw, was a blue-ribbon member of that fix-it generation. My mother learned not to say aloud what she needed, say a new ironing board, because my father would immediately build her one. She liked to buy something from the store occasionally.

Tom Brokaw
They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible, across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria.

Tom Brokaw
As we learned so painfully in Vietnam and the Russians learned in Afghanistan, military superpowers can be brought to their knees by enemies who have geography and zeal on their side, whatever their number. The lessons of David and Goliath are as fresh today as they were in biblical times.

Tom Brokaw
Women of the World War II generation, who had demonstrated so convincingly that they had so much more to offer beyond their traditional work, were the under-pinning for the liberation of their gender, even as many of their husbands resisted the idea.

Tom Brokaw
There's no more telling metaphor than a guy in a football game who does what's expected of him — makes an open-field tackle — then gets up and dances around. When Jerry Kramer threw the block that won the Ice Bowl in '67, he just got up and walked off the field.

Tom Brokaw
They answered the call to save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.

Tom Brokaw
If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.

Tom Brokaw
They were a new kind of army now, moving onto the landscapes of industry, science, art, public policy, all the fields of American life, bringing to them the same passions and discipline that had served them so well during the war.

Tom Brokaw
Every great turn of history's wheel takes us in a new direction, but the destination is not easily discernible because the lessons of history are not fixed and immutable.

Tom Brokaw