Peter Jennings

"Good evening. We begin tonight..."

"Are we out of step with the administration because we do not comport completely to their political point of view?... So they criticize us for it. It goes with the territory, and if we get a groundswell we begin to look at ourselves."

"I have never spent a day in my adult life where I didnt learn something, and if there is a born-again quality to me, thats it."

"I dont think the public realizes how much soul-searching goes on in news organizations about what is the right thing to do."

"There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe. I dont subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially — sorry its a cliche — a rough draft of history. Some days its reassuring, some days its absolutely destructive."

"Theres a whole industry of conservatives saying, "Ah, its those damn liberals," and a whole group of liberals saying, "Its all those damn conservatives"... If you tailor your news viewing, as some people are now doing, so that you only get one point of view, well of course youre going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong."

"When I came to the states in the mid 1960s — 1964, 1964 — I didnt think Id be here maybe a couple years, going to have a great experience in the United States and then go back to Canada. Well, here we are 40 years later."

"Finally this evening, a brief note about change: Some of you have noticed in the last several days that I was not covering the Pope. While my colleagues at ABC did a superb job, I did think a few times I was missing out. However, as some of you now know, I have learned in the last couple of days that I have lung cancer. Yes, I was a smoker until about 20 years ago, and I was weak and I smoked over 9/11. But whatever the reason, the news does slow you down a bit. I have been reminding my colleagues today, whove all been incredibly supportive, that almost 10,000,000 Americans are already living with cancer, and I have a lot to learn from them...and "living" is the key word. The National Cancer Institute says that we are survivors from the moment of diagnosis. I will continue to do the broadcast, on good days; my voice [laughs] will not always be like this! Certainly, its been a long time, and I hope it goes without saying that a journalist who doesnt value deeply the audiences loyalty should be in another line of work. To be perfectly honest Im a little surprised at the kindness today from so many people; thats not intended as false modesty, but even I was taken aback by how far and how fast news travels. Finally, I wonder if other men and women ask their doctors right away, "Okay, Doc, when does the hair go?" At any rate, thats it for now on World News Tonight. Have a good evening; Im Peter Jennings. Thanks, and good night."

"I think sometimes in the establishment that there are a lot of people in America who resent the establishment, who resent the elite universities, who resent the large corporations and with some good reason this year — as we discovered — and who feel and who have felt prior to the advent of this sort of a great involvement of talk radio that they havent had place to debate or even vent. And so, is Rush a deeply serious analyst and commentator? In some respects. Is he a showman as well? I think the answer is yes. But Id never argue that he doesnt have place on the menu."

"My dad was part of the pioneers of public broadcasting in Canada. And he always told me the most important thing you can be in your career is fair. So we all start to see a box and hope that we see the box in the same way. But you recognize in time that people see the box or they see traffic accidents in entirely different ways. So you train yourself over the years to try and give accounting to the variety... and come to some decent place in the middle. But Im not a slave to objectivity. Im never quite sure what it means. And it means different things to different people."

"We have been criticized, a little bit to my surprise, by people who think I was not enough pro-war. That is simply not the way I think of this role. This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public. I think people who have done this and all jobs in journalism have believed that."

"There will be good days and bad, which means that some days I may be cranky and some days really cranky!"