Lester Holt Quotes

I don't think there's any reason in journalism not to approach stories we cover with humility, empathy, compassion, and intellectual openness. I mean, I think those are just important human traits. I don't think that precludes scrutiny, negativity, where it's appropriate.

Men should friendly confer together, and offer one another their gifts and knowledge in love, and try things one with another, and hold that which is best, and not so stand in their own opinion as if they could not err.

I'm not an advocacy journalist - that's not what I do. My role in journalism is to be able to engage the most interesting people with the best ideas.

Everything is an open book. I don't speak on other people's hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I'm going to talk about it. That's what my fan base appreciates the most. I'm universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

I'm not going to name some of my colleagues who are very well-known for their television presentation, but they wouldn't know new information or how to report a story if it came up and bit them.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

I reject the idea that journalists are messengers of the truth. It’s arrogant. I think journalism is a search for the little relative truths that at best keep us relatively sane.

We learn from each other. We learn from others' mistakes, from their experience, their wisdom. It makes it easier for us to come to better decisions in our own lives.

I fully acknowledge that I am not a journalist.

In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgements about what is going on.

If you're smart, you'll always be humble. You can learn all you want, but there'll always be somebody who's never read a book who'll know twice what you know.

Great questions make great reporting.

My own thinking is often clarified and extended by talking with students.

You have to do a lot of listening, you don't just learn out of yourself.

The media's job is to question a premise.

I think the American electorate should work a little harder at getting informed. That includes hearing, truly listening, to what the other side is saying. Whether you're left or right.

I'm not quite pompous enough to think of myself as an educator or a man capable of definitive refutation of falsehoods.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

Having been a journalist for thirty-nine years, I've developed a pretty thick skin.

I want to learn from everybody.

I think that part of being a good journalist, part of being an awake member of the world you're in, is to view yourself as an outsider, and I always have, to some degree.

People come up to me and say, 'Can I just thank you for writing my life?' And I reply, 'I'm glad someone else is as idiotic as I am.'

The Information Highway intrigues me because I have always been a newshound; I have always been curious about why people believe what they believe.

How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable.