Top 70 David Halberstam Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don’t want to do it.”

— David Halberstam

2. “One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.”

— David Halberstam

3. “A good team was simply a group of very disparate athletes who assembled each day from radically different lives and – with luck – for one shared moment put aside their differences, their dislikes, their egos and their rivalries, harnessing their energies towards a common goal.”

— David Halberstam

4. “Always stay in with the outs.”

— David Halberstam

5. “Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.”

— David Halberstam

6. “The most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable.”

— David Halberstam

7. “If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.”

— David Halberstam

8. “I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.”

— David Halberstam

9. “This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.”

— David Halberstam

10. “The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.”

— David Halberstam

11. “These days there’s all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.”

— David Halberstam

12. “I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people.”

— David Halberstam

13. “There’s a great quote by Julius Irving that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.’”

— David Halberstam

14. “As he found beauty in the hamburger, he thought hot dogs unattractive – both aesthetically and commercially.”

— David Halberstam

15. “When I was at Oldsmobile,” he said, “there was something I learned that I’ve never forgotten. There was an old guy there who was an engineer, and he had been at GM a long time, and he gave me some advice. He told me, whatever you do, don’t let GM do it first.” That was it, Davis thought later – the Detroit line, the symbol of the protected industry. Don’t let GM do it first, let the other guy make the early, expensive mistakes.”

— David Halberstam

16. “Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.”

— David Halberstam

17. “If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.”

— David Halberstam

18. “When you are discussing a successful coach,” sports psychologist Bruce Ogilvie once said, not of Ramsay but of the entire profession, “you are not necessarily drawing the profile of an entirely healthy person.”

— David Halberstam

19. “The fury with which Japan unleashed itself upon international trade, the kind of economic Darwinism that was at the center of its impulse, originally came not just from each company’s desire to conquer the world but from its desire to take market share away from domestic competitors. In Japan there was always someone ready to undersell someone else, and there was always someone on the edge of bankruptcy.”

— David Halberstam

20. “If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.”

— David Halberstam

21. “I added another chapter, the story of John Paton Davies, one of the most distinguished of the China hands who had had his career savaged during the McCarthy years. The section reflected my belief that in a better and healthier society he or someone like him might have been sitting in as Assistant Secretary of State during the Vietnam decisions.”

— David Halberstam

22. “In 1953, at the beginning of the Eisenhower era and the glory years of the auto industry, Hudson’s had done $153 million in retail sales; in 1981 the downtown Hudson’s had done only $44 million – a figure, if adjusted for inflation, about 6 percent of the 1953 total.”

— David Halberstam

23. “Under enemy-alien status, as his biographer Robert Chadwell Williams has pointed out, he could not own a car or join a British Civil Defense team, but he could in time work on the most secret aspects of atomic physics.”

— David Halberstam

24. “Toyota would be credited for its just-in-time theory of manufacturing, in which parts arrived from suppliers just in time to be part of the final assembly. But in any real sense that process began at the Rouge. Toasting Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford who in 1982 was visiting Japan, Eiji Toyoda, of the Toyota company, said, “There is no secret to how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell. We learned it at the Rouge.”

— David Halberstam

25. “Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.”

— David Halberstam

26. “Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence.”

— David Halberstam

27. “What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.”

— David Halberstam

28. “One percent of the population ruled – and they were all grafters – while the other ninety-nine percent live under the worst kind of feudalism.”

— David Halberstam

29. “Research is an organized method of finding out what you are going to do when you can’t keep on doing what you are doing now.”

— David Halberstam

30. “Up to then there had been something of a gentleman’s agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things.”

— David Halberstam

31. “No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.”

— David Halberstam

32. “In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.”

— David Halberstam

33. “When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. “Make something,” he admonished. “Create something.”

— David Halberstam

34. “David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.”

— David Halberstam

35. “Mr. Ford, here is our new plant,” Lord Perry, who was the head of Ford in Europe, said proudly. “Where is the water?” the old man asked. “There isn’t any water,” Lord Perry replied. “Well, let’s get out of here,” Ford said. “I don’t even want to look at it.” That had ended the ceremony. Ford had driven off, and they had torn down the plant and moved it to a deep-water site.”

— David Halberstam

36. “Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions.”

— David Halberstam

37. “There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.”

— David Halberstam

38. “She was young and scared, and hadn’t realized there was time to spare.”

— David Halberstam

39. “A staff can be no better than the man it serves.”

— David Halberstam

40. “All professions have some element of theater to them.”

— David Halberstam

41. “One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.”

— David Halberstam

42. “Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.”

— David Halberstam

43. “It hung heavily albeit secretly over the internal calculation of Democratic leaders of the period. But of course it was never discussed in the major newspapers and magazine articles that analyzed policy making in Vietnam. It was a secret subject, reflecting secret fears.”

— David Halberstam

44. “You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.”

— David Halberstam

45. “His counterpart at Chevy, a man named Bill Holler, had once gathered all of his regional salesmen around a brand-new model, opened the door, looked at them all long and solemnly, and then slammed the door as hard as he could. “Boys,” he announced, “I’ve just slammed the door on the best goddam car in the world” – and a huge cheer went up.”

— David Halberstam

46. “It requires a certain kind of mind to see the beauty in a hamburger bun.”

— David Halberstam

47. “He did not like Europe, which he regarded as a lesser continent, populated with people significantly greedier and more materialistic than Americans. It was a place, he noted, where.”

— David Halberstam

48. “Listen, girlie,” said one of the executives of Cadillac, a particularly troubled company, to Maryann Keller, an astute and skeptical financial analyst on Wall Street, “it’s ready to turn around, and it’s going to be bigger than ever.”

— David Halberstam

49. “He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.”

— David Halberstam

50. “Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.”

— David Halberstam