Dan Rather Quotes

Michael Jackson has a new baby boy; no word yet who the father is.

The one thing we can all be sure about in politics is you are as well to expect the unexpected.

John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in the balance, and after months of exhaustive campaigning, he was too tired to stay awake any longer.

It's the beauty and curse of doing a daily show. Some days you've got nothing to talk about and other days Dick Cheney shoots his lawyer in the face and everyone is happy.

I came into politics by accident. I may go out of politics by accident.

When Trump took office, it didn't matter if you'd covered the White House for 10 years or 10 minutes. No one knew what to expect. We would be told about press conferences a few minutes before.

I first wrote about Michael Jackson in the 1980s. His skin was growing paler, his features thinner, and his aura more feminine. Some called him a traitor to his race. Some fussed about his gender fluidity. I saw him as a post-modern shape-shifter. But the shifts grew more extreme and mysterious.

In politics, you're like a toilet seat: you're up one day and down the next.

Sometimes politics is viewed as a boxing match. So, let's look at movies of last year. You know, you prepare for match like creed. Trump is like "Mad Max: Fury Road." We have never seen anything like this in politics. The kind of race he's going to run. I mean, look, he is winning the nomination. He doesn't prepare for debates. He doesn't run advertising. He gets millions of dollars spent against him, it has no effect, he's not running as sophisticated data driven campaign yet he is winning. As each and every day, you just don't know what you're going to get with this guy.

I knew it might put him in an awkward position that we had a discussion before finality has finally happened in this presidential race.

Remember the vast majority of the Democrats as well as all the Republicans in the House of Representatives in Louisiana voted for my signature-piece of legislation in the house which was a bill, actually a bill for true civil rights. That there must be no discrimination against anyone on the basis of race in affirmative-action.

Howard Dean dropped out of the race today. At least he can't claim his voice wasn't heard.

California has gone insane. According to the latest poll, Arnold Schwarzenegger is leading in California's governor's race by 34 points. You can tell that Governor Gray Davis is worried because he spent all day yesterday working on his pecs.

What I'm really more interested in doing - because I think, in a way that's kind of obvious - and you can see, look into Austria - you've got a far-right candidate who may become the president because he's in a close-run race.

I would be surprised if Donald Trump got elected.

The public still ultimately determines what happens to you politically, by virtue of the casting of their vote ... and you cannot ever predict what will move the public in one direction or another.

One of the questions I often get asked is, "Were you surprised that Trump won?" I always answer the same way: "I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised."

The most important things in your life are almost always impossible to predict.

I've seen enough crazy shots to know they happen in the best of families.

I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.

The big news is the midterm elections. Last night Republicans picked up a dozen seats in the House to give them their biggest majority since World War II. Or as they put it, 'Time to party like it's 1939!'

The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery

We can never tell what is in store for us.

If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.