Tom Brokaw > Quotes

“In your pursuit of your passions, always be young. In your relationship with others, always be grown-up. ”
― Tom Brokaw

“You are educated. Your
certification is in your
degree. You may think of
it as the ticket to the good
life. Let me ask you to think of an
alternative. Think of it as your
ticket to change the world.”
― Tom Brokaw

“It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.”
― Tom Brokaw

“The WWII generation shares so many common values: duty, honor, country, personal responsibility and the marriage vow " For better or for worse--it was the last generation in which, broadly speaking, marriage was a commitment and divorce was not an option”
― Tom Brokaw

“there on the beaches of Normandy I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives were laced with the markings of greatness.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“A common lament of the World War II generation is the absence today of personal responsibility ”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“There has never been a military operation remotely approaching the scale and the complexity of D-Day. It involved 176,000 troops, more than 12,000 airplanes, almost 10,000 ships, boats, landing craft, frigates, sloops, and other special combat vessels--all involved in a surprise attack on the heavily fortified north coast of France, to secure a beachhead in the heart of enemy-held territory so that the march to Germany and victory could begin. It was daring, risky, confusing, bloody, and ultimately glorious [p.25]”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed, to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” —From John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, January 1961 Given”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“Healthcare workers are not being shot at, obviously, but they are exposed to dangerous diseases; they lead unconventional, all-hours lives; they are mission-oriented and they work in a hierarchical environment, with the physicians on top and orderlies doing the grunt work at the bottom.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“When the war ended, more than twelve million men and women put their uniforms aside and returned to civilian life. They went back to work at their old jobs or started small businesses; they became big-city cops and firemen; they finished their degrees or enrolled in college for the first time; they became schoolteachers,”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“Is that cancer curable or just treatable.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“The educated class knows the value of good health to quality of life and is willing to pay for it. The poor are more likely to trap themselves in a culture of smoking, poor nutrition, obesity, drugs, and only sporadic attention from a physician.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“postwar America. He learned the insurance business by day and braille by night. Before long the VA found him a job with an elderly insurance broker in his neighborhood. Not too long after that, Broderick had established his own insurance”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“From him I learned that the men told the stories best themselves. So I told Meredith, “Whenever one of these guys comes over to say hello, just ask, ‘Where were you that day?’ You’ll hear some unbelievable stories.” And so we did, wherever we went. What we did not know at the time was that an old family friend back in our hometown of Yankton, South Dakota, had played a critical role in D-Day planning.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“Cancer of whatever flavour triggers a reflective gene: Just let me live and I will learn to be a better person.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“I hoped that as time passed I would be able to raise the cancer shade and allow more light into my daily life. Until then it is CANCER EVERY WAKING MOMENT and the realization that it will be with me until the end, by whatever means.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it, buffer the passage of time. To keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Time of Our Lives: A conversation about America

“Rich got a plan for living. Poor got a plan for dying.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“He tells another story about all that dust in those days.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“What was that World War I saying, “Trust the Lord and pass the ammo”? For me, trust the doctors and the Lord and pass the Velcade, Revlimid, dexamethasone.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“Typically, everyone in the family went to work wherever they could. Young Lloyd sold newspapers, sacked groceries in the local market, and ran the projector at the movie theater. When he wanted to join the Boy Scouts, a county official lent him the fifty cents for the admission fee. He didn’t wear shoes in the summer so that he could have a decent pair in the winter.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“His life before the triumph that defined his legacy was a reminder of the importance of patience, courage, and the absence of self-pity.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“When Kilmer got back home he married Marie immediately and the Army arranged for medical and psychiatric treatment at a prisoner-of-war rehabilitation center in Miami Beach. He was eased back into a normal life in time to use the GI Bill and attend the fall term at Creighton University in Omaha in 1946. For a young man who was proud of his high school diploma just four years earlier, this was an unexpected opportunity.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis. I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease. Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short. I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years. As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.”
― Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

“One of the things that we don't want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we're going to own that country.”
― Tom Brokaw

“ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF D-Day, I was broadcasting from the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, one of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The cemetery is at once haunting and beautiful, with 9,386 white marble headstones in long, even lines across the manicured fields of dark green, each headstone marking the death of a brave young American. The anniversary was a somber and celebratory”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“IN A WAY no one could have anticipated at the time, the military training and discipline required to win World War II became an accelerated course in how to prepare a young generation to run a large, modern, and complex industrial society. Nearly every veteran, however painful the military experience may have been, seems to be grateful for the discipline and leadership training they were exposed to at such a formative age.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“At one time he owned as many as three buildings divided up into rental units. It was as a landlord and as a black man who had overcome so much on his own that he came to hate the welfare system that grew so fast in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. “It just killed ambition,” according to Holmes. “I had all of these tenants who in their late twenties had never worked a day in their life. They just waited around for that government check. No incentive.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

“His superiors in the Merchant Marine were astonished. Here he was, ready to go back to the security of the Merchant Marine Academy for another eighteen months of accelerated training, and he wanted to quit to join one of the most dangerous outfits in the service. His officer offered him a thirty-day furlough to think it over. Broderick said, “No, my mind’s made up.”
― Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation