In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.

I'm a very straight-laced, conservative news kind of guy.

With radio, the listener absorbs everything.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.

I go home by noon, and I'm in bed by 6 p.m. I get up at 1 and do it again.

I used to listen to the soap operas with my grandmother.

I wake about 1 a.m. I'm in the office by 2 a.m. We're on the air at 5.

Any outfit that has to beg its listeners for money is an organization that has to constantly please its listeners or it will dry up and go away. It shouldn't work when you think about it.

Public radio has always been so powerless.

I think we're doing the right things for the right reasons. We're not doing it to sell products. We're not doing it to be popular. We're doing it because in our judgment these stories are important to do, and at this length and this much depth.

When Solomon said there was a time and a place for everything he had not encountered the problem of parking his automobile.

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.

It's also a more personal medium. It seems to go directly to one's brain. There are no pictures to distract.

I got to know every format of every station and who was on and what time.

I wanted to be one of the voices in the box.

Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.

People are always ready to admit a man's ability after he gets there.

Good things just keep happening.

In my case, the listener is often in an automobile driving to work. You can concentrate on the road while still getting an audio message that can be riveting.

I've never been able to predict the future of anything.

Never exaggerate your faults, your friends will attend to that.

The pictures are created by the listener, with a little help from the broadcaster. The pictures are perfect. If you're showing pictures, different things in that picture can distract from the spoken word.

At a tiny station in New Albany, Indiana, which is right across from the river from Louisville, Kentucky, where I grew up. The Louisville stations were loath to hire beginners, so I had to go across the river.

I was encouraged to read aloud in class and vocalize.

If you want anything done well, do it yourself. This is why most people laugh at their own jokes.

The radio was my pal. I was just crazy about it.

Between 2 and 5 I'm reading in to find out what's been going on while I've been asleep.

I'm still excited at being at a microphone and talking to listeners. I love that. It's the most basic element of what I do and I still enjoy it very much.

Nobody cares about your wardrobe, what your tie looks like, or even if you're wearing one, and I don't.

Some are pre-taped interviews because maybe we can't get that person live or maybe we're not sure it's going to work out right so we tape it an hour in advance.

That's the problem with news interviews, you work your tail off to get prominent figures in the news on the radio, but once they've been on, the event passes, the urgency, the issues you talked about evaporate.

Meanwhile, the meek are a long time inheriting the earth.

I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.

We support President Truman's civil rights program.

There are those who say to you - we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

A lot of things happened in a lot of places. And to see how well it was handled in Atlanta. There are a lot of reasons for Atlanta being a special town in the Civil Rights era.

He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.

The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

Eyes is the attempt to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement and to create an emotional, intellectual constituency. But what do you do after that? The black community doesn't have institutions that pick up such moments and preserve them.

It is distressing to me that we live in an age in which we still must fight to protect our civil rights as Americans, in which a hate crime perpetrated against someone based their sexual orientation can go unpunished, and in which discrimination is being written into our laws.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.