Katharine Graham Quotes

Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstance, you have to remake your life.

The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don't print matter a lot.

I remember the Washington in which I grew up as a genuine small town. Maybe this is true for everyone, that we all feel that the times in which we grew up were simpler, less complex.

I always liked Barbara Howar and admired her spunk. I know that she considered me - and Alice Roosevelt Longworth - an exception to her negative feelings about Washington widows and single women, whom she basically found dispensable.

The Montessori Method- learning by doing-once again became my stock in trade ...

When it comes to Washington, most people tend to think first of politics. But Washington is also a geographic and physical place. It is, for instance, one of the few cities of the world where you can talk endlessly about trees.

Dean Acheson was one of the very best and brightest of the men who ever came to Washington.

My mother seemed to undermine so much of what I did, subtly belittling my choices and my activities in light of her greater, more important ones.

I love Martha's Vineyard, where I have had a house for thirty years. I have loved visiting countries around the world. But I always come home to Washington.

To me, involvement with news is absolutely inebriating. It's what makes my life exciting.

If we had failed to pursue the facts as far as they led, we would have denied the public any knowledge of an unprecedented scheme of political surveillance and sabotage.

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.

Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique.

Those first few years of marriage, before the war interrupted all our lives, Phil and I had a very happy time. I grew up considerably, mostly thanks to him.

In Washington, the public and the private intertwine in such a way that they can't be easily separated. This is the city where the personal and the political are most closely linked.

At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man's world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries. But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere.

Potomac School proved to be my first big adjustment - one that helped me with a basic lesson of growing up: learning to get along in whatever world one is deposited.

I didn't really want deadlines and editorial work. I wanted something mechanical and eight hours a day. So I went to work, thinking it was easy - ha, ha - on the complaint desk at the circulation department.

The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock.

The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is the most debilitating to the person who bears it.

What the president never accepted, or even clearly understood – as most people don't understand – is the autonomy editors have, and must have, to produce a good newspaper. I used to describe it as liberty, not license.

The image of me as someone who likes or can deal with a fight is wrong. Some people enjoy competition and dustups, and I wish I did, but I don't. But once you have started down a path, then I think you have to move forward. You can't give up.

Whatever power I exert is collegial.

I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful.

But though he lacked the gift of intimacy, in many ways his supportive love still came through to me. He somehow conveyed his belief in me without ever articulating it, and that was the single most sustaining thing in my life.

My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did.

It took me a while to learn that certain people may have important skills that are not always blazingly apparent. Gradually I came to realize - slow as I may have been - that what mattered was performance, that sometimes people might have to be helped to develop, and that it takes all kinds to make an organization run properly.

The editorial - written by a liberated man - suggested legal and social remedies but concluded that perhaps we can begin with the ultra-radical notion that a woman is a human being.

The organization that I joined when I went to work, the trade association called the Bureau of Advertising, became the first of many over the years in which I was the only woman.

I believed - and believe - that capitalism works best for a freedom-loving society, that it brings more prosperity to more people than any other social-economic system, but that somehow we have to take care of people.

I certainly didn't understand something that I learned later from Dr. Kay Jamison, the author of An Unquiet Mind, about her own manic-depression. She has written that it is a lethal illness, particularly if left untreated, or wrongly treated.

In large families, it seems it is hardest to be either the first or the last child. That was certainly true in ours.

The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome.

I truly believed that other people in my position didn't make mistakes; I couldn't see that everybody makes them, even people with great experience.

One speaker after another used to start his presentation coyly by saying, "Lady and gentlemen," or "Gentlemen and Mrs. Graham," always with slight giggles or snickers.

So few grown women like their lives.