Koppel Quotes & Sayings

Where did all the creativity go?' she wondered aloud as she pondered the newly rediscovered story of her youth. 'If I was true to myself, would I have ended up living this ordinary life? — Lily Koppel

Neighborliness is more than a slogan here; it is, as it has always been, an essential element of self-preservation in a challenging environment. The — Ted Koppel

How I love - writing, acting, breathing the atmosphere- and one day I'll have it. If I cannot write, I shall die. — Lily Koppel

A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure regime change even before he took power in January 2001 ... It has been called a secret blueprint for US global domination ... A small group of people with a plan to remove Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush was elected president ... And 9/11 provided the opportunity to set it in motion. Not since Mein Kampf has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed years ahead of the blow. — Ted Koppel

Apollo 11 was the movie premiere of moon landings, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Neil was a bit of a mystic, but also a taciturn guy from what I can tell. He really saw the moon as looking like the American high desert. He wasn't someone who dealt in metaphors. — Lily Koppel

Royal Young's memoir is about a dreamer, set in the post- apocalyptic celebrity world of today, and Young, who grew up in New York - like Holden Caulfield if he wanted to be famous - is looking for adventure and action and becomes entangled in all sorts of romantic and sordid relationships. He points out the perplexing tragedy (and good fortune, I think) of what it means to be talented and rebellious, but not a celebrity. — Lily Koppel

It becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia. — Ted Koppel

President Carter famously said the hostages were the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing he thought about at night. It was a downright foolish thing to say, because it made the people holding the hostages realize that they had an awful lot of influence over the United States. — Ted Koppel

Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder. It is a howling reproach. — Ted Koppel

I have the necessary lack of tact. — Ted Koppel

There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us. — Lily Koppel

There is no more respected or influential forum in the field of journalism than the New York Times. I look forward, with great anticipation, to contributing to its op-ed page. — Ted Koppel

Morrie," Koppel said, "that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?"
"You bet," Morrie whispered. — Mitch Albom

As the saying on the Northwest Coast still has it, "when the tide goes out, dinner is served. — Tom Koppel

Pessimists calculate the odds. Optimists believe they can overcome them. — Ted Koppel

I think we're glazing eyes all across America. — Ted Koppel

Well, Keith Alexander, the former director of the NSA wants to say every company in the United States falls under one of two categories, those that have been hacked and those that don't yet know it. — Ted Koppel

Emotions get in the way but they don't pay me to start crying at the loss of 269 lives. They pay me to put some perspective on the situation. — Ted Koppel

There's harmony and inner peace to be found in following a moral compass that points in the same direction regardless of fashion or trend. — Ted Koppel

What Moses brought down from Mt Siniai were not ten suggestions. They are Commandments — Ted Koppel

But not enough about the extraordinary day-to-day lives the wives experienced behind the scenes. — Lily Koppel

He mentioned a dear friend Morrie had, Maurie Stein, who had first sent Morrie's aphorisms to the Boston Globe. They had been together at Brandeis since the early sixties. Now Stein was going deaf. Koppel imagined the two men together one day, one unable to speak, the other unable to hear. What would that be like?
"We will hold hands," Morrie said. "And there'll be a lot of love passing between us. Ted, we've had thirty-five years of friendship. You don't need speech or hearing to feel that. — Mitch Albom

The problem is everybody is worrying about explosive vests and people with AK-47s. We live in a day and age when someone sitting in Somalia or in Chile or in Perth, Australia, can be sitting there with a laptop and can theoretically take down one of our power grids or part of our infrastructure and do infinitely more damage. Nobody talks about that. It's not a question of who comes into the United States. We're way past that. — Ted Koppel

Today, reports of the day's events are conveyed to the viewing public by way of alternate universes, The Fox News cable channel conveys its version of reality, while at the other end of the ideological spectrum MSNBC presents its version. They and their many counterparts on radio are more the result of an economic dynamic than a political one. Dispatching journalists into the field to gather information costs money; hiring a glib bloviator is relatively cheap, and inviting opinionated guests to vent on the air is entirely cost-free. It wouldn't work if it weren't popular, and audiences, it turns out, are endlessly absorbed by hearing amplified echoes of their own biases. It's divisive and damaging to the healthy functioning of our political system, but it's also indisputably inexpensive and, therefore, good business. — Ted Koppel

To face despair and not give in to it, that's courage. — Ted Koppel

Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone. — Ted Koppel

My function is, as objectively and accurately as I can, to present reality to people out there, and doing that as quickly as we do is quite difficult enough, thank you. — Ted Koppel

They don't want to get dirty and they know that Trump loves this kind of thing. And your polls, and yours are what's giving them the material that they need, it's the oxygen that the Trump campaign requires, a poll every three or four days showing him where he is. — Ted Koppel

These days, NORAD's peak period of public visibility is at Christmastime when it tracks the course of Santa and his sleigh. — Ted Koppel

Americans are obsessed with wild, outlandish things. Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, and Michael Jackson are all wild, outlandish things. — Lily Koppel

Read until my eyes ached
it was hardly important
but proof again that there is always an escape. — Lily Koppel

Going after ISIS, it's beautiful, I like it. — Ted Koppel

John looked handsome in the photo of him in his — Lily Koppel

We've all heard about space and landing on the moon, but somehow it's a very tom-boyish adventure. It's planting the flag on the moon by Neil Armstrong, and it has this very male-hero edge to it. — Lily Koppel

I have been an unabashed fan of NPR for many years, and have stolen untold excellent ideas from its programming. — Ted Koppel

If we're able to identify our own ignorance, we can identify someone else's expertise. We learn how to listen to each other. And that is the foundation of human understanding. — Ted Koppel

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions. — Ted Koppel

Journalism has become a sort of competitive screeching: what is trivial but noisy and immediate takes precedence over important matters that develop over time. — Ted Koppel

Am reading the life of Mozart and cannot help thinking that one's capacity for suffering is in direct proportion to one's greatness. — Lily Koppel

But the irony is they think they're being tough on ISIS and Trump thinks he's being tough on ISIS. Senator Rubio in his interview with you touched on it very, very lightly. — Ted Koppel

In our era of celebrity, where every life is made public through email, blogs and Facebook, one of the greatest oddities may be that there is not a livelier discussion about the individual's basic need for a more private space. — Lily Koppel

Manhattan was kaleidoscopic. Cubist. Just when she was feeling one way, the seasons changed, and so did she. — Lily Koppel

Apollo 17 would be the sixth and final flight to the Moon. In total, the American space program had taken the work of two and a half million people and had cost nearly $25 billion. — Lily Koppel

were, however, all consumed by a burning — Lily Koppel

Would anyone else like to say anything nice about women? — Ted Koppel

I believe in being fully present," Morrie said. "That means you should be with the person you're with. When I'm talking to you now, Mitch, I try to keep focused only on what is going on between us. I am not thinking about something we said last week. I am not thinking of what's coming up this Friday. I am not thinking about doing another Koppel show, or about what medications I'm taking. I am talking to you. I am thinking about you. — Mitch Albom

More than four thousand programs produced and consumed. Some of them were pretty good, a great many of them were forgettable; but a handful may even be worth a book. — Ted Koppel

Look, fundamentally there are two sets of questions that apply in the war against terrorism. The one set of questions deals with the, "Where is it going to happen? What's going to happen? When is it going to happen?" The other set of questions deals with, "What is it that our enemy, the terrorists, are trying to achieve?" What are they trying to induce us to do? — Ted Koppel

When people ask me what is an editorial cartoonist, I often say we're kind of a hybrid. We're a cross between Edward R. Morrow, Ted Koppel and the Son of Sam. — Michael Ramirez

To live in books is cowardly
but people are not worth investigation. — Lily Koppel

I'm still very interested in telling one-of-a-kind women's stories. — Lily Koppel

And there will continue to be a specific threat, and there will continue to be terrorism, as there has been for as long as human history exists. — Ted Koppel

America's space age was officially announced on April 9, 1959. — Lily Koppel

Dodie could often be seen at the club, clutching a white terry-cloth towel in one hand, her cigarette holder in the other, as she pedaled away on one of the club's stationary bikes. — Lily Koppel

Koppel won an Emmy for that show. Miscavige took credit for it, saying, "I got Ted the Emmy." He even had a replica of an Emmy made and placed in the Officers Lounge at Gold Base. But he never went on television again. — Lawrence Wright

Soon after launching Sputnik in 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik II with its passenger Laika ("Barker," also known as Little Curly), the Soviet space dog. She was a female stray found on the streets of Moscow (and those godless Soviets let her die in orbit). — Lily Koppel

The responsibility that I feel is to do as good a job as a journalist as I can possibly do. — Ted Koppel

Siemens had to go to every deployment of their software worldwide and change the password. Getting — Ted Koppel

People shouldn't expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the 'fringe' media. — Ted Koppel

My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remain just as well-developed as they were before I went. — Ted Koppel

Terrorism is simply the weapon by which the weak engage the strong. — Ted Koppel

Donald Trump is, in effect, the Recruiter-in-Chief for ISIS. ISIS wants nothing more right now than to have the world divided into Judeo-Christian on one side and the Islamic world on the other. That's exactly what Trump is doing for them. I think it's time we start with thinking about what ISIS wants and then not doing it. — Ted Koppel

Set your sights beyond what you can see. There is true majesty in the concept of an unseen power which can neither be measured nor weighed. — Ted Koppel

Every single of us is going to be saying, "Thank God, finally, an interesting convention." But you're right about all those people out there. All the people who have been energized by the Trump campaign are going to be very, very angry folk if they think that Trump is not well treated. — Ted Koppel

In the days of Caesar, kings had fools and jesters. Now network presidents have anchormen. — Ted Koppel

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead. — Ted Koppel

What Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions, they are Commandments. Are, not were. — Ted Koppel

There is something very very special, universal and easily identifiable among all Jews; it is beyond territory, it is something we all have in common. — Ted Koppel

Florence has a passion for books. When she saw the one she was seeking, she would recognize it, as if the volume had belonged to her in a previous life. — Lily Koppel

It is precisely among young, educated radicals, warns Austin, that a new generation of cyber warriors will be recruited. — Ted Koppel