David Halberstam Quotes

I think McCarthy was a menace... because he corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right... and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we [conservatives] are all suffering from it.

I was always playing the hard-bitten drunk.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I found that out when I was Attorney General in Massachusetts.

In the immortal words of Dean Acheson, I will not turn my back on Joe McCarthy.

The establishment of Washington is utterly corrupt and is incapable of governing.

The King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper; the Queen cries out but, but sins on.

… a jackass in the original package. He is a poor drunken imbecile.

... the Kremlin ought to put McCarthy on its payroll.

I'd go and get really drunk somewhere ... in the street. Pass out somewhere and sleep in the gutter.

But if I wasn't playing, I would drink Saturdays, then Sunday, then Monday. Then I would try and train and it was no good, then have another drink just to pass the day away.

I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.

I had a lousy marriage and I drank too much.

We know that second terms have historically been marred by hubris and by scandal.

Surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon.

I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad; but New York City?

There is a tendency in all parties, when they have been for a long time in possession of power, to augment it.

Our representatives are betrayers of the people.

Huey Long’s methods outdid the good he did with the results.

The people in Congress have no interest in preserving the Constitution because they are interested in power.

The most unlovely political character in our history since Aaron Burr.

Washington is a cesspool of non-accountability.

L. Ron Hubbard [founder of Scientology] was a falling-down drunk who drank himself to death.

As I watched some of the Watergate hearings I kept asking myself what all these people—[John] Dean and others—were doing there in the first place. Was there really an honest job that needed doing?

The President [William Clinton] is a scumbag.