Anderson Cooper Quotes

I've covered a couple wars and a lot of breaking news and a lot of cops-and-robbers situations.

In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.

There are still journalists who risk their lives in situations of conflict, versus those who sit behind a desk at 'News of the World' to report on whether someone is going out with somebody or not.

I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.

My life isn't always at risk, even if I'm in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn't necessarily mean being shot at all the time.

I wish I was the kind of writer who would go to a war zone and write about something that's meaningful and important to people, but that's not my area of coverage.

Journalists dedicate their lives to covering war - they make many personal sacrifices, and it's not something that's gender-based. In a place like Libya where there's heavy fighting, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.

I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.

The best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority - all authority - especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.

I'm astonished by how much journalists stay with the story, try to get to the truth of the story, maybe give years of their life to it, maybe go over to Syria, maybe lose their life. Then, the next day, it's a new story.

There are a lot of reporters who I feel are a lot more courageous and fool-hardy than I am. Maybe at the top I'd put Dexter Filkins. He's an extraordinary man in terms of his nerve and ability to get into dangerous situations and tell the story cogently. He's bringing back real human stories. I admire that.

I was a war correspondent and journalist for a long time, and I was very near the towers on 9/11 and very shortly after in Afghanistan.

My journalistic heroes are all the guys like Peter Arnett of Vietnam, and my style in journalism is you got to stand there, and you got to see it with your own eyes.

I was working in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, and I banged on the door and said, "I'm ready to go." And they said, "What's your combat experience?" I said, "Does my parents' divorce count? It was pretty rough." Then they said, "What's your reporting experience?" And I said, "I covered the women's volleyball team in college exceptionally well." The guy was like, "You are so not ready to be a war correspondent."

... war reporting is still essentially the same - someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people, be they government, military or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen.

Some day I'd like to cover a war in a country as ugly as war itself.

Historically, war journalists have embedded themselves with one side, which means the greatest threat comes from the clearly delineated enemy of that side.

I spent a good part of the nineties roaming the Earth writing about conflict. It was very grueling. I was beginning to find this way of life was, wow, addictive and deeply meaningful.

There has always been tension between reporters and the administration, particularly when it comes to war in the modern era. You can go to Kennedy or Johnson and see that they weren't happy with David Halberstam or Morley Safer.

CNN was one of the first news organizations in the world to train and equip its journalists before deploying them to dangerous areas.

We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?

I don't go to war for the adrenaline rush. I cover wars because that's what I've ended up doing.