Nancy Gibbs Quotes

Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.

As a final indignity for the defeated warrior, Vice President Nixon had to preside over the roll call of the Electoral College. "This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated," he told the assembled members of Congress. "I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system." He got a standing ovation.

I've been grateful that 'Time's' reach and mandate is so broad; anything you're interested in, you can usually write about.

Time is valuable; people are busy.

A good president needs a big comfort zone. He should be able to treat enemies as opportunities, appear authentic in joy and grief, stay cool under the hot lights.

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better.

The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.

The wand is mighter then the sword.

At times, it seems as if the only women effortlessly balancing their jobs, kids, husbands and homes are the ones on TV.

If anything, the power of the cover of 'Time' has increased as the media landscape has atomized.

As long as people have been making little people, they've wanted to know how not to.

Lydon Johnson realized he really was President, that his identity had changed by President Kennedy's shocking death, when aides who had been like family to him minutes before, stood in his presence on Air Force One.

Anyone with the right mix of parental paranoia and entrepreneurial moxie can make a fortune by selling parents the equipment we think will keep us one step ahead of our kids.

If Heaven is willing to sing to us, it is little to ask that we be ready to listen.

The leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19 worldwide is not accident or violence or disease; it is complications from pregnancy. Girls under 15 are up to five times as likely to die while having children than are women in their 20s, and their babies are more likely to die as well.

A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon.

Kids are more nimble than wise ...

Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you're not looking.

In design as in life, smart can also mean wise, kind, inspiring - and cost-effective. And that has a charm all its own.

His manner somehow friendly and courtly at the same time.

A president can't go to every memorial service.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal?

You know the great thing about Truman," he told Goodwin, "is that once he makes up his mind about something - anything, including the A bomb - he never looks back and asks 'should I have done it? Oh! Should I have done it?' No, he just knows he made up his mind as best he could and that's that. There's no going back. I wish I had some of that quality.

A lot of camps and summer programs for kids seem to have discovered that among the most valuable things they offer is what they don't offer. No Wi-Fi. No grades. No hovering parents or risk managers or parents who parent like risk managers.

What is it about summer that makes children grow? We feed and water them more. They do get more sun, but that probably doesn't matter as much as the book they read or the rule they broke that taught them something they couldn't have learned any other way.

While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.

There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.

All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together.

A runner's stride is not perfectly efficient.

Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.

Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger.

Nixon to Clinton: When seeking advice from people who are more experienced than you, tell them what you plan to do first, and then ask for their reaction. Don't ask for their advice, and then ignore it. That way you save on bruised feelings.

People don't blame the act of driving for auto accidents.

New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola.

I'm wondering how many elected figures any of us could find who do not, in the front or back of their minds, remember who does them favors, who doesn't.

Of all ennobling sentiments, patriotism may be the most easily manipulated. On the one hand, it gives powerful expression to what is best in a nation's character: a commitment to principle, a willingness to sacrifice, a devotion to the community by the choice of the individual. But among its toxic fruits are intolerance, belligerence and blind obedience, perhaps because it blooms most luxuriantly during times of war.

It's the experts in adolescent development who wax most emphatic about the value of family meals, for it's in the teenage years that this daily investment pays some of its biggest dividends.

Nixon urged Clinton to maintain his relationship with Yeltsin but make contact with other democrats in Russia. He warned Clinton away from some ultranationalists and toward those interested in liberty and reform. He pressed Clinton to replace his ambassador in Kiev and concentrate future U.S. economic aid on Ukraine, where it would matter most.

Some people are born strong or stretchy, or with a tungsten will.

When National Guardsmen shot four unarmed students at Kent State, virtually the entire system of higher education shuddered and stopped.

Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.

Even if it wasn't always morning in America during the years of his presidency, Reagan's eagerness to insist that it was tapped into a longing among voters. They didn't want to picture themselves turning down their thermostats and buttoning up their cardigans. They wanted to strut again. Reagan opened his arms and said, 'Walk this way.'

Professor Obama has at least talked to us like we're adults.

Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope. [ ... ] Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken before came together to try to save it. And that was a victory all its own.

Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.

occupying the office Hoover once

I've always found that once you're in the door of a place and you have the chance to show how you operate and how talented you are, then anything can happen.

George W. Bush, though a president's son, is cast as Reagan's heir even more than his father's.

As a candidate, Obama disdained the game of politics, a self-conscious contrast to all the tireless political athletes named Clinton.

Democracy presumes that we're all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.

When you are a media celebrity, every word you speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak.

Studies show that the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use.

If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe.

There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.

It is faith that drives us to build, a belief that we cannot be limited by lack of nerve or airspace.

Calling Rand Paul 'the most interesting man in politics' is an invitation to an argument - but one we suspect he'd love to have.

It's always been a luxury to be able to hop a plane to Paris, to Venice, to the Grand Canyon.

Power is not just political. It can be cultural; it can be spiritual.

Bill Clinton left office with a more than 60% approval rating.

Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what's left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school.

As you probably know, I've written a lot about the presidency, so it's obviously exciting when you get to interview a president and write about it.

You can't predict when a crisis might hit your family, whether it's with an elderly parent or with your children.

Terror works like a musical composition, so many instruments, all in tune, playing perfectly together to create their desired effect. Sorrow and horror and fear.

We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.

For the truly faithful, no miracle is necessary. For those who doubt, no miracle is sufficient.

In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 1 in 5 girls make it to secondary school.

Progress is seldom simple; it comes with costs and casualties, even challenges about whether a change represents an advance or a retreat.

Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.

It is actually the neuroscientists and evolutionists who do the best job of explaining the reasons behind the most unreasonable behavior.

Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.

There's a smartphone gait: the slow sidewalk weave that comes from being lost in conversation rather than looking where you're going.

My husband and I don't have sons, so we never had to ask ourselves how we'd have felt about them playing football.

The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance?

Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting.

Few Westerners know Iran as well as Robin Wright: her first trip there as a journalist was in 1973, and she has covered every important milestone since, from the Islamic revolution and the hostage crisis to the more recent staring contest with the West over Tehran's nuclear program.

Right now, doctors can test for about 2,500 medical conditions, but they only can treat about 500 of those. So what do you do with the knowledge about the others?

After 9/11, whatever the evidence of intelligence failures, many people still saw that attack as almost unimaginable, so brutal and brazen an assault.

For God to be kept out of the classroom or out of America's public debate by nervous school administrators or overcautious politicians serves no one's interests. That restriction prevents people from drawing on this country's rich and diverse religious heritage for guidance, and it degrades the nation's moral discourse by placing a whole realm of theological reasoning out of bounds. The price of that sort of quarantine, at a time of moral dislocation, is - and has been - far too high.

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

America's presidents tend to die young. Maybe it is in the nature of the men who reach such heights, or of the job once they attain it.

Death will never be pretty - its sights and smells too close and crude. And it will never come under our control: it gallops where we tiptoe, rips up our routines, burns our very breath with its heat and sting.

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.

We've seen what happens when it serves a president's interest to flaunt his faith - which is almost inevitably does, since every poll affirms that Americans want their leader to submit to some higher power.

High school is a haunted house in April, when seniors act up because the end is near. Even those who hate school sometimes cling to the devil they know. And for the kids who love it, the goodbyes are hard to think about.

Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly - young and old, faithful and cynical - as has Pope Francis.

All wars, even the noblest, bring a reckoning of means and ends.

It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.

I don't think it's necessary to shout if you have a good story. But I also don't think you should shy away from being bold in the statement that you're making.

'Sesame Street's' genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things - death, divorce, danger - in terms that children understand and accept.

Runners exalt the marathon as a public test of private will, when months or years of solitary training, early mornings, lost weekends, rain and pain mature into triumph or surrender. That's one reason the race-day crowds matter, the friends who come to cheer and stomp and flap their signs and push the runners on.

Enter politics, and you enter the glass house; there are no secrets and no places to hide.

Modesty means admitting the possibility of error, subsuming the self for the good of the whole, remaining open to surprise and the gifts that only failure can bring. There are many ways to practice it. Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager.

In 2001, President George W. Bush was condemned for politicizing science with his decision to limit federal funding for stem-cell research; in 2009 President Obama was praised for reversing it, even though his decision was arguably just as political.

Sometimes justice is at its most merciful when it's blind.

The crossroads of science and politics is a dodgy place.

Charlie Rangel was writing laws on our taxes as chair of the Ways and Means Committee while somehow neglecting to pay his own.

I come from a family of teachers, and I believe ideas matter; the good ones deserve reverence, and the bad ones, defiance.