Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Jennings

That line has the breezy bravado of a newsroom creed, but it’s also a confession. Jennings isn’t bragging that journalists are fearless; he’s naming the occupational hazard of believing your curiosity is automatically virtuous. “One tends to think” softens the claim just enough to admit it’s a tendency, not a law of nature. The subtext: our instincts push us toward total access, and we often mistake that impulse for principle.

Coming from Jennings, the face of ABC’s World News Tonight during an era when broadcast anchors still served as a kind of national referee, the remark lands with extra weight. His generation helped define journalism as a public service performed at mass scale: war, scandal, grief, celebrity, private tragedy turned into collective narrative. The camera shows up; the mic is extended; the story becomes “newsworthy.” In that environment, “nothing off limits” isn’t merely attitude, it’s a workflow.

What makes the quote work is its quiet tension between moral certainty and moral risk. Journalists need the permission structure of “off limits to no one” to confront power, expose corruption, and document harm. The same permission structure can flatten people into content and turn intimacy into evidence. Jennings captures the profession’s central paradox: to do the job well, you must believe your questions deserve answers, while also recognizing that the belief itself can become a blind spot. The line reads like a warning label printed inside a press badge.