Gwen Ifill Quotes

Change comes from listening, learning, caring and conversation.

Act right all the time, because someone's always watching.

I just think we as consumers of information media must be very clear what it is we are consuming. Whether we are choosing to get our information by listening to people fight about it. Or whether we're choosing to get it by listening to the facts or watching the facts as they're laid out and then reaching our own conclusions. It's very different ways of info gathering, but it's not all journalism.

I don't think that Donald Trump represents the traditional Republican values and heritage of my party. That's one reason that I don't support him. The Republican Party has always revered the individual. We led the way in abolishing slavery, for example, and we recognize the dignity and worth of every human being. it is clear that Donald Trump, by his derogatory comments, by his mocking of the most vulnerable people in our society, by his marginalization of ethnic and religious minorities, doesn't reflect the traditional Republican values.

Because I would never work for a niche publication or a niche program on television and because I am a journalist and not an opinion person, my job is to try to see how many different points of view I can represent or how. It's not even a question of who you don't offend because you are always going to offend somebody. The question is how can you get people to listen to the information you have to present.

In the media universe we're in, where there are people screaming on one end, there is no problem at all with having a little bit of extra politeness.

I'm not in love. I'm not out of love. I'm just trying to find some version of the truth.

Journalists are accused of being lapdogs when they don't ask the hard questions, but then accused of being rude when they do. Good thing we have tough hides.

I knew early on that I wanted to be a reporter, but I didn't know I was a political journalist until my first job in Boston, in the '70s, covering the public school committee at a time when busing was a huge issue. Children's lives were being directly affected by political decisions, and that's when I realized that everything is politics.

It's never too late to move to a good place to try to improve your child's outcomes in adulthood.

This is what happens with a breakthrough. The first ones through the door often get bruised if not broken. Eventually, with a little political acumen and racial sensitivity and a lot of hard work, a smooth new place can emerge.

My family was very engaged in the world around us. My father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and an immigrant from Panama. He was deeply involved in civil rights causes, which scared my mother - she was also an immigrant, from Barbados, who had her hands full with six kids, and she worried that my father would get deported. But because of his passion for politics and civil rights, we paid close attention to current events. We would watch political conventions together - for fun!

Hope springs eternal, even in politics.

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.

People are always surprised when they see me speak live that I have a sense of humor. And I say, Well, you know, there's not much opportunity to laugh when you're reporting the dread news of the day.

We needed someone to recognize the importance of check and balances, accountability, transparency. There was a real systemic problem at South Carolina State, a problem that has gone on for 25 or 30 years

I think I'm careful. My goal is to try to stay away as much from opinion journalism as possible.

I spent my career trying to speak to the broadest possible audience whether it's in print or whether it's in television.

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

The latest national polls show a tightening in the race to the White House, especially in key states like Ohio and Florida. But when it comes down to it, winning in November [2016] will depend on which candidate has a viable path to 270 electoral votes.

It's not surprising that you wouldn't see that side of me on television, but in real life I find the world to be quite a funny place.

History shows that people often do cast their votes for amorphous reasons-the most powerful among them being the need for change. Just ask Bill Clinton.

If you take the same child and put them in two different places, it will dramatically shape the way in which their economic outcomes are realized later in life.

It's funny, everywhere I go some people ask me whether it's going to be a Latino breakthrough, some people ask me whether it's going to be a female breakthrough, and then I'm reminded that five years ago we didn't even know Barack Obama's name.

Barack Obama didn't get elected president, would never have been elected president, had he decided to run as a black candidate. In order to reach the broadest number of people you have to speak to their interests as broadly as you can.