Christiane Amanpour Quotes

But 17 years ago, I arrived at CNN with a suitcase, with my bicycle, and with about 100 dollars.

It occurred to me that I have spent almost every working day of the past ten years living in a state of repressed fear.

U.S. soldiers, with whom I now have more than a passing acquaintance, joke that they track my movements in order to know where they will be deployed next.

I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.

I still have many years left in me, if I still have a job, but that`s what I`ll tell my son when he`s old enough to torture me with painful questions.

I`m not an American but I have always had the outsiders` respect for the American people and the American way.

I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent.

We do it because we`re committed, because we`re believers.

We hear foreign accents on CNN. It`s crazy, it`s wild, who knows, maybe they`ll take you because you certainly don`t fit in, in the American spectrum of news.

Because if we the storytellers don`t do this, then the bad people will win.

And I worked my way up through every level. I was a writer, I was a producer, I was a field producer, I was a reporter and I am a reporter.

I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories, not to run stories, that people have risked their lives to get.

Mostly, as I said, a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for, this is the business that we have chosen.

Yes, you are running businesses, and yes, we understand and accept that, but surely there must be a level beyond which profit from news is simply indecent.

They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be.

And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place.

I am no longer sure that when I go out there and do my job it`ll even see the light of air, if the experience of my network colleagues is anything to go by.

For instance, why are we terrorizing this country, leading with murder and mayhem, when crime is actually on the decline, as somebody, as somebody mentioned?

We in the press, by our power, can actually undermine leadership.

What Americans don`t care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days, what they don`t care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they`re too stupid to know the difference.

I am personally thrilled though by the changes at CNN, which no doubt you have all read about. because it means we are responding to the times.

Here in the United States, our profession is much maligned, people simply don`t trust or like journalists anymore and that`s sad.

We, I believe, are in the fight of our lives to save this profession which we love. I believe we can do it, and I believe we can win this battle.

In Bosnia, little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it`s okay to aim his gun at a child.

I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.

More times than I care to remember I have sympathized with too many of them assigned like myself, to some of the world`s royal bad places.

Our industry has invested so much money in technology that perhaps it`s time to invest in talent, in people.

If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility at least to stay alive.

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic passion and conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I most definitely would never have children.

What we do and say and show really matters.

I was showing a man and telling his story and explaining how ill he was, and it was a live camera and all of a sudden I realized that he was dying.

We were thrilled and we were privileged to be part of a revolution, because make no mistake about it, Ted Turner changed the world with CNN.

And one thing that I always believed and that I knew for certain was that I could never have sustained a personal relationship while I worked this hard, or while I was that driven this intensely by the story.

We manage the fear, I manage the fear, but it certainly takes its toll, the strain does.

And I really believe good journalism is good business.

In Iran the whole reform and democracy movement has been based on the emerging free press.

But to be self-obsessed is simply not o.k. for the most important country in the world, the United States, which affects every other country in the world.

In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Little did we know then that CNN would become the big league.

I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of our century, at the end of the 20th century.

If we have no respect for our viewers, then how can we have any respect for ourselves and what we do?