{"author":"David Halberstam","author_id":"David+Halberstam","total_quotes":72,"quotes":[{"text":"The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["honesty","hubris","humility","pride"],"id":6971,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["curiosity","open-mindedness"],"id":12385,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["anxiety","fear","panic","perspective"],"id":27931,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["ambition","curiosity","lifelong-learning","reading"],"id":61767,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"They (the media) found little quality of depth to him, that when she said on the platform with that which he said to them in private. The qualities of introspection and reflectiveness that they particularly treasured were missing.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["authenticity","charisma","humility","leadership","vulnerability"],"id":63998,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["baseball","democracy"],"id":67248,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"He hated House members who longed only to run for the Senate, and senators who longed only to run for the presidency. He was appalled by what he felt television had done to the Senate by the mid-fifties. It had become a major launching platform for presidential campaigns. He thought television had ruined the Senate as a serious body. “All they do there is preen and comb their hair and run for President. It’s like a presidential primary over there,.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["ambition","contentment"],"id":70595,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"Why did McNamara have such good figures? Why did McNamara have such good staff work and Ball such poor staff work? The next day Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with the figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them, he dissembled even within the bureaucracy, though, of course, always for a good cause. It was part of his sense of service. He believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["integrity","lies-politics","loyalty","morality","power"],"id":71996,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["journalism"],"id":76125,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"},{"text":"He was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.","author":"David Halberstam","tags":["comparison","ego","envy","popularityity"],"id":77929,"author_id":"David+Halberstam"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":72,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}