Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Jennings

Jennings is offering the kind of advice that sounds almost too modest to be “wisdom” until you remember what his job required: staring at catastrophe on deadline, then speaking to a nation as if panic were optional. “Have a sense of humor about life” isn’t a cute personality trait here; it’s an emotional technology. For a journalist, humor is a pressure valve that keeps cynicism from hardening into contempt and grief from turning into paralysis. It’s how you stay human while professionally absorbing the day’s worst headlines.

The dash matters. “You will need it” lands like a private aside from someone who has seen what the camera doesn’t capture: the exhaustion, the absurdity, the backstage contradictions of power and tragedy. Jennings isn’t romanticizing the news business; he’s warning you that life will outpace your coping skills, and that the only sustainable response is a little levity that doesn’t deny reality but makes it survivable.

Then he pivots: “And be courteous.” Not “be nice,” not “be kind” in the abstract, but courteous: a deliberate, almost old-school discipline. In Jennings’ context, courtesy is civic hygiene. It’s the practice that allows disagreement without degradation, interrogation without cruelty, authority without arrogance. Paired with humor, it reads as a survival kit for public life: laugh enough to avoid self-importance; behave well enough to avoid becoming the story.