The wit and wisdom of Helen Thomas
“I think I’ll work all my life. When you’re having fun, why stop having fun?”
Unsourced, but widely published quote
“You said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up… My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?”
From a question to Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s spokesman, at the daily press briefing in 2003
“This is the worst President ever. [George W. Bush] is the worst President in all of American history.”
From a January 2003 Society for Professional Journalism event when Ms Thomas thought she was off the record
“The day Dick Cheney is going to run for president, I’ll kill myself. All we need is another liar… ”
“You don’t spread democracy through the barrel of a gun.”
In an interview with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show in June 2006
“Every president hates the Press. Every president thinks that all information that comes to the White House is their private preserve after they all promise an open administration on the campaign trail.”
In an April 2004 interview with The Majority Report
“Both Blair and Bush have been found lacking in their credibility. Usually by this time a government would have fallen. I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.”
From the same April 2004 Majority Report interview
“There’s no accountability for a blogger. They can ruin lives, reputations, and once you send something into the air, it’s going to land, and there’s nothing that can curb them from saying anything they want. Everybody with a laptop thinks they’re a journalist, and everybody with a cellphone thinks they’re a photographer.”