David Halberstam

Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.

If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.