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Quotes by Theodore H. White

A liberal is a person who believes that water can be made to run uphill. A conservative is someone who believes everybody should pay for his water. I'm somewhere in between: I believe water should be free, but that water flows downhill.
– Theodore H. White
For those men who, sooner or later, are lucky enough to break away from the pack, the most intoxicating moment comes when they cease being bodies in other men's command and find that they control their own time, when they learn their own voice and authority.
– Theodore H. White
Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
– Theodore H. White
He is like a good prewar house-solidly built. They don't build them that way anymore. He's also been repainted several times.
– Theodore H. White
He who is created by television can be destroyed by television.
– Theodore H. White
His passion has aroused the best and the beast in man. And the beast waited for him in the kitchen.
– Theodore H. White
I class myself as a manual laborer.
– Theodore H. White
I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.
– Theodore H. White
I saw Chungking for the first time more than 40 years ago - a city of hills and mists, of grays and lavenders, two rivers shaping it to a point and the cliff rising above me like a challenge.
– Theodore H. White
I, alas, must present myself somewhat ignominiously as a chef in a busy kitchen. Somewhere a novel is bubbling on a back burner, an old attempt at history may come out of the freezer.
– Theodore H. White
I'd get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories.
– Theodore H. White
If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you're free - however free one can be on this planet.
– Theodore H. White
It was like walking through a field playing a brass tuba the day it rained gold. Everything was sitting around waiting to be reported.
– Theodore H. White
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
– Theodore H. White
The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie.
– Theodore H. White
The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.
– Theodore H. White
The gusto of one, the indignation of the other; the challenge of the one party, the response of the other; the eloquence and the comedy, the passion and the issues were ours-no other country can provide them.
– Theodore H. White
There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it's wonderful.
– Theodore H. White
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of an American presidential campaign.
– Theodore H. White
Those 40 or 50 national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps-they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers.
– Theodore H. White
When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend.
– Theodore H. White
When that book came out, it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella.
– Theodore H. White
When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.
– Theodore H. White
With electricity we were wired into a new world, for electricity brought the radio, a crystal set and with enough ingenuity, one could tickle the crystal with a cat's whisker and pick up anything.
– Theodore H. White
With the end of the nominating process, American politics leaves logic behind.
– Theodore H. White
Power in America today is control of the means of communication.
– Theodore H. White
Quality in a classical Greek sense is how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy.
– Theodore H. White