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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
What you're saying to an audience, whether it's a print audience as a print reporter, or in my business, a television audience is, "Folks, I've looked into this to the best of my ability, and to the best of my knowledge what I'm telling you is accurate." And if I'm not certain, I will tell you that. I will say, "it's reported," or "there are reports of this, but we can't confirm them." If the audience doesn't believe that, then they're not going to watch me, and why should they? If they think I'm making it up, if they think I would distort it for some private agenda, if they think I'm so sloppy in my work that -- even though I don't mean any harm -- I'm always getting it wrong, they're going to watch somebody else. And indeed, they should. Now, that doesn't mean that I won't make a mistake, or that I won't occasionally tell them things which prove not to be true, but they will understand that. As long as they believe that I didn't know it at the time, and I honestly believed that what I was giving them was professionally accomplished, because I knew how to do the news business and that I believed to be the truth.
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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
You understand in the news business what you can do and what you can't do: the corners you should not cut. At first it may not seem to you that there's any reason why you shouldn't cut them, and then you learn that you shouldn't, and therefore then, you don't. And I say to people, "Don't take a chance." Let's say that morality or ethics have nothing to do with it. I do think they do have something to do with it. Let's pretend though for a moment they don't. I said, pragmatically, don't take a chance of destroying your reputation because you can get a story this way. Don't go through the desks when that's actually not your property to go through. Even though you learned something and you might beat the competition, it will come back and bite you. It will bite the news organization you work for, and you will destroy the very success that you were hoping for.
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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
"If you want to be universally loved, if you want to win a popularity contest, don't get in the news business." At least not in the sense of being the front guy. Because there is no way you can report a story and have everyone say, "Well, that's fine, and I'm sure they did a great job." And particularly if you're covering politicians, because people invest their loves, and their hopes, and their hatreds in politicians. And when you stand on the north lawn of the White House talking about President X and you have to report that something went wrong that day, all of his fans says, "Well, of course, that's wrong. He couldn't have made a mistake like that, it's this vicious reporter."
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Rita Dove
Former Poet Laureate of the United States
Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit. And as much as we'd like to give -- and we want to be perfect, well-rounded individuals -- all of us have our quirks. We all know we've had our foibles. And we've got these embarrassing moments in our lives, and things that we're ultimately ashamed of. What writing -- what I think all the arts do -- is to reveal. Let us see again and experience again, all the ambiguities that make up -- and the contradictions that make up -- a human being: the good and the bad and how they can exist in one person and make a complex individual. And to do that, that means being very honest. Being honest all the time.
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Mohamed ElBaradei
Nobel Prize for Peace
I think that is the most important lesson you learn in life, that you have to be ready to make a compromise. You do not compromise your principles, but you have to be ready to compromise. You have to understand that you cannot get your way 100 percent. Life is too complicated. You are not an island, and you work in a social setting, and you need to understand that you work always -- at the family level, at the society level -- to work out the compromise that is perceived to be fair. You don't get 100 percent of what you want, but at least you will get the basic minimum that you require.
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