Charles Kuralt Quotes

American - Journalist September 10, 1934 - July 4, 1997

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

Charles Kuralt

The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.

Charles Kuralt

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.

Charles Kuralt

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.

Charles Kuralt

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

Charles Kuralt

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.

Charles Kuralt

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough.

Charles Kuralt

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

Charles Kuralt

There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.

Charles Kuralt

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

Charles Kuralt

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

Charles Kuralt

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.

Charles Kuralt

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

Charles Kuralt

I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy.

Charles Kuralt

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.

Charles Kuralt

I think I'd have done better if I had been a little more relaxed-if I had not pressed quite so hard, if I'd not lost quite so much sleep.

Charles Kuralt

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

Charles Kuralt

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

Charles Kuralt

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.

Charles Kuralt

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

Charles Kuralt

Kids are always asked, What are you going to be when you grow up? I needed an answer. So instead of saying, a fireman, or a policeman, I said, a reporter.

Charles Kuralt

Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.

Charles Kuralt

My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.

Charles Kuralt

Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.

Charles Kuralt

What are you working on?

The Kitchen Table