I can't tell you what that little ingredient is which makes that first person want to go on and aggressively do more, and the other person be content to not do that. It's a mystery, but it does happen.

I was a typical farm boy. I liked the farm. I enjoyed the things that you do on a farm, go down to the drainage ditch and fish, and look at the crawfish and pick a little cotton.

I don't know many people, if any, who have had some straight line toward success. I mean, they start here, they work hard, they've got what it takes, and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.

And on election night I'd go down to city hall in El Paso, Texas and cover the election. In those days, of course, we didn't have exit polls. You didn't know who had won the election until they actually counted the votes. I thought that was exciting too.

I wanted to be in this business, and once I got into the business I knew I enjoyed it, and I liked it, and I wanted to continue, but I never had a five year plan.

If you have a setback, and you're not doing well and then you overcome it somehow, it always sticks with you. You know it could happen again.

You really get the most out of sweet corn if you pick the corn off the stalk and rush it to a pot of boiling water. The longer you wait, the more sugar you lose. But if you get it in the first half hour, that is the sweetest corn ever.

The truth is, when I got started in this business, it wasn't because I had a full understanding of the importance of the business, but because I thought it was fun. I found it exciting. It fulfilled me, whatever it was that I was looking for.

And from a military school which taught me that to fit into society, you can't just do anything you damn well please because it will suit you. And that it's much better to be with the winners than it is with the losers.

I can't tell you what that little ingredient is which makes that first person want to go on and aggressively do more, and the other person be content to not do that. It's a mystery, but it does happen.

Some days the competition would beat me and I'd go home thinking awful thoughts, want to hide under the bed, depressed. But of course, in the news business, when you're working a daily news broadcast, you get your victories and defeats every day.

But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.

There was a little bit of ham in me. And there's a lot of people say there's a lot of ham in me.

My mother gave me a push. If I hadn't had her, maybe I wouldn't have had the push. If I hadn't gone to military school, maybe I wouldn't have decided to get with the program. Maybe I'd be running a bulldozer, rather than going on and doing something more.

My mother did all she could to control me, but at age 14 she sent me to a military school.

And really, the basis, I think, of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education.

News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.

It was kind of exciting being on the radio. Not everybody was on the radio.

But as a young kid, I never did, really have an ambition to be a farmer. I never thought, gee, I would like to farm, and I want to raise these crops. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do.

I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it.

As I went to college, I went into radio and television. Now I suppose most people think that's one step ahead of basket weaving as a major in college, but it was part of the journalism department.

Well, I was born in El Paso, Texas, it was in the nearest hospital to the family farm.

It wasn't until the late '70s that a lot of people knew me.

But I guess the lesson is this: If you don't have confidence in yourself and think that you are worth hiring, or whatever it is, you can't expect anyone else to.

But my observation has been, certainly in the news business, you've got to give 110 percent.

The questions don't do the damage. Only the answers do.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

I endeavor to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content with what cannot be mended and patient when there be no redress.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

There's probably a way to use that great content and to live under the radar now and then in order to reach a new audience. That's the thinking I'm talking about.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things.

What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition.

The problem is we need much more moral content.

Part of keeping space open is not to try to choose a form - to spend more time thinking about content, and let form take care of itself.

If we thought it would improve our relationship, we would get married tomorrow, but as it is, nearly 7 years after we got engaged, we are content to wait.

If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

Comedy is really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

Content is often the reason users come to your site.

To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.

Why should you be content with so little? Why shouldn't you reach out for something big?

In Japan, people don't really sing about sexual content.