Katharine Graham > Quotes

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

“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.”
― Katharine Graham

“A mistake is simply another way of doing things.
”
― Katharine Graham

“Some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn.”
― Katharine Graham

“Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstance, you have to remake your life.”
― Katharine Graham

“The nicest thing you did was to take me seriously when a lot of people wouldn’t have, but not too seriously, which was just right.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“I believe...that education is not only the most important societal problem but the most interesting.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“She has told me that what she found most destructive about minority-group psychology “is that one comes to share the conviction of the majority: that one is less able, less intelligent, less educable, less worthy of responsibility.” My sentiments, exactly.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“I think heroes and heroines are both vulgar and boring and usually lead that kind of lives. But when you tell people you were just doing your own thing in an admittedly escalated situation, they say, Ah, yes, etc.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“People react in such complicated ways to any death, but particularly to the death of a parent, because a lot of what one feels is about oneself and the sense that nothing now stands between that self and dying. You have now become the older generation. I believe that the closer and more loving the relationship is, the deeper but simpler the grief. Of my father’s children, my brother had the hardest time”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“There is a saying about relationships in Washington: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“When you've lived alone for a number of years I'm afraid that you begin to realize how hard it would be to accommodate to living with someone else. Adjusting to or even indulging his desires and his life. It was clear to me that I was married to my job. And that I loved it.”
― Katharine Graham, 我的一生略小于美国现代史：凯瑟琳·格雷厄姆自传

“Who is going to influence whom in the new association? Warren may have entered the ocean in California, but I am sitting down in Virginia with Ben Graham’s beginner’s book and “How to Read a Financial Report” by someone called Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith. I am told I have to finish Ben Graham very soon because Warren is unwilling to pay the small fine involved in having the book out of the Omaha public library too long.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“I resigned myself quite contentedly to the life of a vegetable. I went to cooking school in the morning, had lunch with friends, sat in the sun with other pregnant ladies, talked, gossiped, did everything in short that’s in the books including laying out my husband’s slippers and smoking jacket. (I’m serious I assure you.) And the funniest part of all is that I liked it.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish.”
― Katharine Graham, The Pentagon Papers: Making History at the Washington Post

“I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn. What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge.”
― Katharine Graham

“The more subtle inheritance of my strange childhood was the feeling, which we all shared to some extent, of believing we were never quite going about things correctly. Had I said the right thing? Had I worn the right clothes? Was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self-absorbing, even overwhelming at times, and remained so throughout much of my adult life, until, at last, I grew impatient with dwelling on the past.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“No human being can blindly accept authority in one area of life and become self-reliant in day-to-day decisions in the field of morals, politics and economics. The secular public school trains independent minds for leadership in every area of life; the parochial school trains for obedience to authority.… We must close the door tight against the present attempts of the Catholic hierarchy and reactionary Protestants to force our people to support sectarian schools whose rapid increase would destroy our secular school and tear our nation into irreconcilable factions. The costs of private and parochial education are mounting steadily. Few American girls wish to become nuns.…”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“hand and working to unite the country, Nixon”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“No longer would the Post write such lines as one identified by Chal Roberts in his history of the paper: “Sam Jones, 24, Negro, was arrested for larceny yesterday.” Overnight, he eliminated “freebies”—trips paid for by the government and free tickets for anything. Also, after just a few weeks on the job, he called in the police reporter, Al Lewis, to ask if he was having parking”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“and just when I was ready to hit him, he’d laugh in that way of his to let me know he loved me. And he made me a better man.”
― Katharine Graham, The Pentagon Papers: Making History at the Washington Post

“The end result of all this was that many of us, by middle age, arrived at the state we were trying most to avoid: we bored our husbands, who had done their fair share in helping reduce us to this condition, and they wandered off to younger, greener pastures.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“It’s hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“He was parsimonious in the extreme. Once, when we were together at an airport, I asked him for a dime to make a phone call. He started to walk some distance to get change for a quarter. “Warren,” I exclaimed, “the quarter will do,” and he sheepishly handed it over.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“At the Post, we received a lot of unpleasant phone calls, many readers expressing the sentiment that they imagined we were all popping champagne corks to celebrate the result we had wanted from the beginning—in short, the “I-hope-you’re-satisfied” school of thought.”
― Katharine Graham, The Pentagon Papers: Making History at the Washington Post

“He, who hated to hurt people, had to begin to deal with all the hurt his actions had wrought—for me, for the children, for Robin, for himself.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir