Top 60 Helen Thomas Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Get the hell out of Palestine.”

— Helen Thomas

2. “I’m not anti-Jewish; I’m anti-Zionist.”

— Helen Thomas

3. “You’re only as good as your last story.”

— Helen Thomas

4. “Life is too short to drink the house wine.”

— Helen Thomas

5. “We don’t go into journalism to be popular. It is our job to seek the truth and put constant pressure on our leaders until we get answers.”

— Helen Thomas

6. “I’m of Arab background.”

— Helen Thomas

7. “I’ll tell you how I handle stress. I say-This too shall pass. You’ve got to try to stay cool and admit when you’re wrong, and tell them when you’re right.”

— Helen Thomas

8. “I love my work, and I think that I was so lucky to pick a profession where it’s a joy to go to work every day.”

— Helen Thomas

9. “Everyone with a cell phone thinks they’re a photographer. Everyone with a laptop thinks they’re a journalist. But they have no training, and they have no idea of what we keep to in terms of standards, as in what’s far out and what’s reality. And they have no dedication to truth.”

— Helen Thomas

10. “I don’t think a tough question is disrespectful.”

— Helen Thomas

11. “We are the only institution in our society that can question a president on a regular basis and make him accountable. Otherwise, he could be king.”

— Helen Thomas

12. “But when will our leaders learn – war is not the answer.”

— Helen Thomas

13. “If we care about the children, the grandchildren, the future generations, we need to make sure that they do not become the cannon fodder of the future.”

— Helen Thomas

14. “It’s time for women to make their voices heard. Their silence on the subject of war and peace is deafening.”

— Helen Thomas

15. “You didn’t tell a lie, you just left a big hole in the truth.”

— Helen Thomas

16. “This is the worst President ever. He George W. Bush is the worst President in all of American history.”

— Helen Thomas

17. “Try to reject war and give peace a chance. Question the powers that be and find out why they make the dubious decisions they do that send young people to war.”

— Helen Thomas

18. “Congress, the White House, and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists.”

— Helen Thomas

19. “Truman fired the popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he disobeyed orders in the Korean War. Johnson knew that he had reached the endgame in Vietnam when Gen. William Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, requested 240,000 more troops in 1968 for the prolonged war that also could not be won.”

— Helen Thomas

20. “Most people think of the mind as located in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind doesn’t really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormones and enzymes, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, and vision.”

— Helen Thomas

21. “I’m decrepit but I don’t want to give up, and I love my work.”

— Helen Thomas

22. “I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.”

— Helen Thomas

23. “As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.”

— Helen Thomas

24. “People will never know how hard it is to get information, especially if it’s locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they’d stamp ‘top secret’ on the color of the walls.”

— Helen Thomas

25. “I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter. Now I wake up and ask myself, ‘Who do I hate today?’”

— Helen Thomas

26. “I never thought about heaven per se. I think when you’re dead, you’re dead. If anything happens after that, you just hope you don’t go to hell.”

— Helen Thomas

27. “I have a background and an understanding of what’s happened in the Middle East that a lot of people don’t have, because there’s been no interest.”

— Helen Thomas

28. “American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic.”

— Helen Thomas

29. “I wrote that President Bush is passing on to President-elect Obama two wars and an economic debacle. I call it a depression. And he is arming Israel against the Palestinians in every way in Gaza.”

— Helen Thomas

30. “You don’t spread democracy through the barrel of a gun.”

— Helen Thomas

31. “You cannot have a democracy without an informed people.”

— Helen Thomas

32. “I think I’ll work all my life. When you’re having fun, why stop having fun?”

— Helen Thomas

33. “I had a lot of fun bantering back and forth with Kennedy. But for ease and comfort, it would be Gerald Ford. He was a down-home type. I came from the Midwest and he came from the Midwest. He was nonaggressive and kindly.”

— Helen Thomas

34. “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

— Helen Thomas

35. “Don’t let the politicians chip away at the New Deal and the Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare, that puts a floor beyond which the elderly, the sick, the powerless do not starve or lack for medicine or shelter.”

— Helen Thomas

36. “I’ve always felt privileged to cover the White House and to have that ringside seat to history.”

— Helen Thomas

37. “I think that presidents deserve to be questioned. Maybe irreverently, most of the time. Bring ’em down a size. You see a president, ask a question. You have one chance in the barrel. Don’t blow it.”

— Helen Thomas

38. “The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.”

— Helen Thomas

39. “We got the vote, which we should’ve been born with, in 1920. Everything we’ve had to struggle for it’s ridiculous.”

— Helen Thomas

40. “I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive.”

— Helen Thomas

41. “All presidents rail against the press. It goes with the turf.”

— Helen Thomas

42. “The presidential news conference is indispensable because it is the only forum in our society where you can be questioned on a regular basis and held accountable.”

— Helen Thomas

43. “Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the ‘smoking gun’ tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.”

— Helen Thomas

44. “I got into the Kennedy White House because at the time I was president of the Women’s National Press Club, and they assigned me to cover the early days of the Kennedy campaign. Jackie especially. Everyone was interested in the family.”

— Helen Thomas

45. “I was in Independence, Missouri when Johnson signed the Medicare bill, with Truman standing there. Truman had first proposed Medicare, but couldn’t get it through.”

— Helen Thomas

46. “I covered Kennedy when she was three years old and the darling daughter of President Kennedy who doted on her and whose mother did everything to protect her from the prying press.”

— Helen Thomas

47. “We’ve got to break through the wall of secrecy. It’s America’s fate.”

— Helen Thomas

48. “We began to see the renovation of our offices as a subtle part of the Nixon war against the press.”

— Helen Thomas

49. “The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that’s what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy.”

— Helen Thomas

50. “There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred – by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.”

— Helen Thomas