Tina Brown Quotes

Some weddings take longer to plan than others.

With so many part-time people on - and not on - the job, corporate America has started to feel like it's on a permanent maternity leave. Colleagues are an amorphous, free-floating army of rotating waifs whose voicemails are clogged with plaintive requests from their own offices for missing information.

The first black president was a hotter plot line than the first woman president.

What's interesting about the Taliban, is they're more afraid of educating girls than they are of drones. One educated girl is more scary to the Taliban than a drone.

One of the the great things about having had something that didn't work out is: So what? I am fine.

Unlike the Kennedy dynasty, who always knew how to pay off people who might make trouble, the Windsors can't bring themselves to part with any royal trinkets.

Celebrity these days is completely for sale; it's not remotely mysterious. But there's something that remains glamorous and mysterious about royalty.

For Sarah Palin, the least experienced on the world stage, the stress of maintaining the fiction that she was qualified to be vice president sent her over the deep end almost immediately. She went off on a ferocious spending spree that might have killed a lesser woman. Katie Couric's straightforward questions unraveled her.

'Worshipping in private,' as Obama does, comes off as just another form of annoying elitism.

'Wingnuts' is the first book bearing the imprint of Beast Books.

By the end of 'Game Change,' one feels that the candidates' few happy moments are those when they 'lose it.'

Washington's Alfalfa Club dinner is a populist's nightmare.

No one I know has a job anymore. They've got gigs.

When you truly study top performers in any field, what sets them apart is not their physical skill; it is how they control their minds.

Magazine articles are the new books.

The comptroller of New York City ought to have all the characteristics of a major corporation's CFO - quiet rigor, obsessive care for detail, incorruptible judgment, an ability to work assiduously behind the scenes with the key stakeholders.

Unlike his predecessors, Obama is not big on 'Masterpiece Theatre' nostalgia.

The women of Afghanistan, left behind as their men fought, did what the women of World War II did - used their wits and resourcefulness to preserve some semblance of civilization.

I am thrilled to share the news that Andrew Sullivan is bringing his trailblazing journalism to 'The Daily Beast.'

It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama's meager resume - 'a mere community organizer!' - before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama's experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.

In TV, you always feel you are standing on the tracks of an oncoming train.

A reporter asked me which famous woman was my role model, a question that always leaves me stumped. I know it's the wrong feminist answer, but most of my role models have been men. They always had the lives I wanted.

To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What's new is the way it's hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.

Corporate communications will become a high-tech art, just as political communication is for Obama.

Once in a while you have to bite the hand that reads you.

It's Obama's bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed.

The British Isles are awash with the choice of beautiful historic churches, abbeys, and cathedrals where one king or another has tied the knot and bestowed a royal precedent.

Owning news makes you important; it gives you a seat at the table.

It's actually harder than it looks to be a good pundit on the air. You've got to have stuff to say.

TV journalism is a much more collaborative, horizontal business than print reporting. It has to be, because of the logistics. Anchors are wholly dependent on producers to do all the hustling.

The natural creativity of the staff morphed 'The Daily Beast' very fast into what has become a newsroom. Aggregation lives on the Cheat Sheet, the video player, and in the breaking news slot in the first big box. The rest is all original, generated by Beast writers and editors.

Movie stars today are as greedy for additional kids as bankers are for bonuses. It's the new badge of authenticity.

Having a baby is like falling in love again, both with your husband and your child.

There is nothing radical about Obama except the fact of who he is.

I keep thinking about how terrifyingly vulnerable women are in so many countries.

What is new is the multiplying reach and volume of the Internet, concentrating the toxicity of destructive emotions and circulating them in the political bloodstream with unparalleled velocity.

Obama achieved something in his first year with health care that successive presidents have been unable to achieve.

I'm trying to be entertaining without being mean.

Public life has become so gladiatorial. Every day, another reputation bites the dust.

Bill Clinton, talking about the need to financially empower wives and mothers in regressive countries, once remarked that women have 'the responsibility gene.' No one has that gene more markedly than his wife.

It's as if inside the White House the belief in Obama's inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it's a startling revelation.

The hazard of confessional books is how fast the world moves on while they're written.

Oprah's stock in trade has always been her powerful unmediated connection. She could feel your pain and empower you to talk about it.

Until 1869, when they were banned, debtors' prisons were the great incinerators of British reputations. Those who were unable to pay their bills were jailed until their creditors were paid - an unlikely event, given that the prisoner was unable to work.

When George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, the precious possession he brought with him from home was his personal feather pillow. The theme of the Bush years was obliviousness. He was famously unavailable for debate and dialogue. He was deaf to countervailing voices. He hit the sack early and always got a good night's sleep.

I just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I've been or something I've done. Or politics. It's going to what's on my mind at the moment.

In all the debate about Afghanistan, we don't hear much about our obligation to the wretched lives of Afghan women. They are being treated as collateral damage as the big boys discuss geopolitical goals.

It's interesting how the view from abroad can shift and remake perceptions of homegrown celebrities, the ones who are part of the gross domestic product.

The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all. Everyone is under too much scrutiny now to take a chance on candidates who suddenly blow up into a comic meme, a punchline, a ribald hashtag.

Obama's great asset has always been an ability to maintain his air of authority without being baritone about it. He can be boring, but he is never ridiculous or pompous.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone's definition of an all-American girl - attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul?

We've heard a lot in recent polemic about how to win the fight for the corner office. But pushing up against a glass ceiling is practically a luxury when you consider the millions of women who can feel the floor dropping beneath their feet.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the Obamacare tech nightmare is how wholly predictable it all was. Anyone who has been involved in building the most rudimentary of web operations knows nothing ever works as it's supposed to. Even awesome Apple, mighty Microsoft, and gargantuan Google miss deadlines.

Top doctors, I have come to believe, are as big a menace to your health as top money managers are to your bank account. They are almost never available to talk to.

Obama, for all his brilliance, has no real, felt understanding of management structures or of business.

Feminism in some ways has become quite dormant.

Hide from change and it will hide from you

Obama's stern demeanor punctuated by intermittent flashes of his wide, relaxing smile is his greatest weapon in defusing pent-up angst.

There are a multitude of mothers in the world who have a daughter who is stolen, or who are stolen daughters themselves.

American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long, a whole generation gave up on them.

The number one way of becoming powerful in Washington is by becoming the 'Washington Post.'

Obama can't change his cool disposition, though it would be nice if he lost the vaguely grudging air he gives off that problems of management get in the way of ideas.

What America is thirsting for now is a battalion of strong, down-to-earth 'doers' - managers, frontline activists, business and social entrepreneurs engaged in tackling America's manifold problems of unemployment, education, and competitive slouch.

Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton.

It is ironic that American women now need to be fortified by the inspiration of the women of the Arab Spring, who risked so much to win basic human rights.

The Taliban knows they have more to fear from an educated girl than an American drone.

The vaults of Buckingham palace are groaning with priceless, useless freebies from foreign dignitaries.

You can get an interview with anyone overseas on the basis of being part of 'Newsweek.' It still has a great deal of impact.

Now everyone leaking and tweeting and posting on everyone else is the acknowledged way to get ahead in the 21st century.

More Brazilian women earn Ph.D.s every year than do men.

An enormous number of mothers in the U.S. are working double time, graveyard shifts, and more than one job just to put food on the table for their kids.

The viral power of online media has proven how fast creative ideas can be spread and adopted, using tools like cellphones, digital cameras, micro-credit, mobile banking, Facebook, and Twitter. A perfect example? The way the Green Movement in Iran caught fire thanks to social media.

Economics has become as riveting as politics.

Everywhere you look, there's a hunger to put the ethos by which Wall Street thrives on trial.

'Out of the box' corporate thinking helped carry real American innovation out in a box. A pine box.

For a guy who believes in hope, Obama doesn't seem to be able to spread much of it around. How can he? We know too much now about the hollowness of institutions and the frailty of their leaders.

Being president, you may have more power than anyone else in the country, but you quickly discover that you have much, much less than you thought you'd have going in. You're hamstrung in ways you never dreamed of.

Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides credit to productive enterprise. Whatever.

I think that big, sort of theatrical relaunches tend to set you up for failure and hype.

I know as much as anyone how much her most fervent supporters want Hillary Clinton to run for president.

'The Daily Beast' and Howard Kurtz have parted company.

Where did the inspiring Obama of the campaign go, that Facebook pied piper who friended the whole world with this update: 'Change you can believe in.' What happened to him?

Obama fans become more and more glum that he keeps flubbing the very role he was expected to be so good at: Therapist to the nation. The Great Comforter.

Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies.

Hillary Clinton has spent her entire career looking bug-eyed with incredulity when an interviewer asks her whatever question she most expects at that moment.

The question for Obama is how he can rein in the furies of populism while making us all feel the malefactors of great wealth are being sufficiently punished.

It was Barry Diller's idea to start 'The Daily Beast,' and he has turned out to be the best partner I've ever had. There's no one better to go into the jungle with.

It's one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs.

Periodically, 'The New York Times' runs a business news story lamenting how few women still make it to the top in the Wall Street boys' club. Could it be that women are choosing to be conscientious objectors in these wars of one against all?

Politicians have always been required to be fake, but now the career havoc wrought by a stray, flying sound bite means they have to sustain their fakeness all the time.

What does it take to be a great social chronicler? Perhaps one of the key attributes is an understanding of what it feels like to fall from grace.

Any great, long career has at least one flameout in it.

The Duke of York has never remarried.

Diana was better qualified than anyone to know that you don't just marry a man, you marry his family.

If a star football player can have a mythical girlfriend, why can't I have a mythical Congress?

I think British journalists do well in America because the newspaper culture there is so strong - telling stories and presenting them readably is in their DNA. British newspapers get a terrible rap, but they are brilliant in their presentation, most of them, so full of vitality and literary wit.

Prince William's smiling hostility toward the press is his non-negotiable core value. I am told he is so protective of his privacy he has been known to plant false tips with friends he distrusts and watch the media to see if they play out.

Captain Richard Phillips of the good ship Maersk Alabama - and Sully Sullenberger splashing down his crippled airliner in the Hudson River - broke through the poisonous smog of economic depression and Wall Street skullduggery with a reminder that pure individual heroism is a daily occurrence if we know where to look for it.

Admitting weakness seems to be such a severe psychic threat for Bush that when he makes a mistake it's safer just to reinforce it. The strategy creates a perverse system of rewards and punishments.