Walter Cronkite - Time Quotes

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This is the essential importance of the Alliance for Better Campaigns' efforts backed by Common Cause. It is our campaign to give free time to all legitimate candidates. … What our campaign asks is that the television industry yield just a tiny percentage of that windfall, less than 1 percent, to fund free airtime.

Walter Cronkite
From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 p. m. Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago. [pause as Cronkite fights back tears, then regains his composure] Vice President Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to where he has proceeded; presumably, he will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the 36th President of the United States...

Walter Cronkite
Since he came out of the west to team with David Brinkley back in 1956, Chet Huntley has been our competitor — and what a competitor! — but he also is a colleague and a good friend. Tonight, over on that other network, as we say, he's saying good night to David for the last time on their evening newscast, returning to his native Montana to build a resort, and, I suspect, perhaps to get involved in politics. As he leaves the daily broadcast scene, a giant departs the stage. For journalism and for ourselves, we hate to see him go, but that's the way it is: Friday, July 31, 1970. Goodbye, Chet.
Chet Huntley : Goodbye, and good luck, Walter.

Walter Cronkite
We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait. Democracy, civilization itself, is at stake. Within the next few years we must change the basic structure of our global community from the present anarchic system of war and ever more destructive weaponry to a new system governed by a democratic UN federation.

Walter Cronkite
For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.
While we spend much of our time and a great deal of our treasure in preparing for war, we see no comparable effort to establish a lasting peace. Meanwhile, emphasizing the sloth in this regard, those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.

Walter Cronkite
All the European democracies have far higher election turnouts than ours, and all of them provide their candidates with extensive free airtime. In fact, of all the major nations worldwide that profess to have democracies, only seven — just seven — do not offer free time. These are Ecuador, Honduras, Malaysia, Taiwan, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States of America. Does it make us proud to be on such a list?

Walter Cronkite