Marie Colvin Quotes

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 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 highest admiration I have for my colleagues is not for someone in a studio in New York but for somebody on the ground in places that they've gone to fight to tell the story.

Our embedded reporters during the war agreed to guidelines established by the military.

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

There was a time when I first started when I made a fake press pass and borrowed a camera and headed into wars, and for three years, that was the only kind of story I was interested in doing.

I had an eye-opening experience in Baghdad at the end of 2004 and I thought that the story of these guys who have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world would be an interesting way to look at the war in a broader sense.

I respect journalism. I was always very aware of journalism from a very broad point of view, but I'd say my baptism by fire was doing the Donald Margulies play Time Stands Still. That for me was a real education because I spent a lot of time with some incredible journalists, war reporters particularly - Bob Woodruff, Dexter Filkins - people who were very helpful in painting the picture for me and reading the accounts of people and what they experienced, a lot of PTSD.

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

To conflict journalists, a tiny, tight-knit tribe, tragedy is practically an occupational requirement: our work requires us to seek it out, measure it, contextualize it, and chronicle it.

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

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.

During the war, in which several of our embedded correspondents were able to report from moving vehicles crossing the Iraqi desert, the use of technology made news gathering safer.

War coverage should be more than a parade of retired generals and retired government flacks posing as reporters.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.

I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.

Reporters were all part of the war effort. They went along with it, and not only that, they abetted it.…It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.…They wrote only a part of the war

The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.

I sort of think in a way that many of us young reporters who had the opportunity to go overseas for our organizations were kind of, in a sense, war profiteers. We were enhancing our careers while covering that terrible conflict.

The photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.

It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is.. we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.