1990
“I regret that, in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation, really.”
Newseum interview (1996) http://www.newseum.org/news/news.aspx?item=nh_CRON090714_2, accessed 2009-07-21
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Walter Cronkite 50
American broadcast journalist 1916–2009Related quotes

You Shall Know Our Velocity! (2002)

“Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.”
Variant: All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.
Source: Hear the Wind Sing
My Boy Friend’s Name is Jello (p. 95)
Short fiction, Or All the Seas with Oysters (1962)

Letter to Admiral Henry Seymour, after coming upon part of the Spanish Armada, written aboard the Revenge (31 July 1588 {21 July 1588 O.S.})
Context: Coming up unto them, there has passed some cannon shot between some of our fleet and some of them, and so far as we perceive they are determined to sell their lives with blows. … This letter honorable good Lord, is sent in haste. The fleet of Spaniards is somewhat above a hundred sails, many great ships; but truly, I think not half of them men-of-war. Haste.

Remark to his nephew about his copious profanity, quoted in The Unknown Patton (1983) by Charles M. Province, p. 184
Context: When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. … As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence.

2015, Naturalization Ceremony speech (December 2015)
Context: We celebrate this history, this heritage, as an immigrant nation. And we are strong enough to acknowledge, as painful as it may be, that we haven’t always lived up to our own ideals. We haven’t always lived up to these documents. [... ] We succumbed to fear. We betrayed not only our fellow Americans, but our deepest values. We betrayed these documents. It’s happened before. And the biggest irony of course was -- is that those who betrayed these values were themselves the children of immigrants. How quickly we forget. One generation passes, two generation passes, and suddenly we don’t remember where we came from. And we suggest that somehow there is “us” and there is “them,” not remembering we used to be “them.”