“Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.”

“We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.”

“It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.”

“In one way or another, President Obama's critics will dog him all the way to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and even his admirers will continue to have doubts about his accomplishments if not his promise.”

“While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.”

“I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.”

“When he entered the Oval Office - by fate, not by design - Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?”

“The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything - meals, jobs, clothing.”

“There's a lot of arrogance in the medical community. There are good, reliable websites you can go to for information - the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins.”

“In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.”

“If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.”