Top 100 Nancy Gibbs Quotes
#1. Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal?
Nancy Gibbs
#2. When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.
Nancy Gibbs
#3. Assassinated just four days before. It was like
Nancy Gibbs
#4. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#5. A runner's stride is not perfectly efficient.
Nancy Gibbs
#6. Sometimes justice is at its most merciful when it's blind.
Nancy Gibbs
#7. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#8. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change does not come naturally.
Nancy Gibbs
#9. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#10. Rand Paul does not like being compared to his father Ron any more than sons named Bush like to dance in their father's shadow, but the crucial difference is that while the Bushes all hail from the relative mainstream of the GOP, the Pauls have an ideological tributary virtually to themselves.
Nancy Gibbs
#11. I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.
Nancy Gibbs
#12. When I was coming out of college, storytelling was very much something you did with pencil and paper, so the technological platform versatility, I think, is really valuable.
Nancy Gibbs
#13. Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.
Nancy Gibbs
#14. If anything, the power of the cover of 'Time' has increased as the media landscape has atomized.
Nancy Gibbs
#15. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#16. Our children will outwit us if they want; for when it comes to technology, they hold the higher ground. Unlike other tools passed carefully and ceremonially from one generation to the next - the sharp scissors, the car keys - this is one they understand better than we do.
Nancy Gibbs
#17. It is faith that drives us to build, a belief that we cannot be limited by lack of nerve or airspace.
Nancy Gibbs
#18. The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.
Nancy Gibbs
#19. Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
Nancy Gibbs
#20. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#21. There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.
Nancy Gibbs
#22. After 9/11, whatever the evidence of intelligence failures, many people still saw that attack as almost unimaginable, so brutal and brazen an assault.
Nancy Gibbs
#23. Professor Obama has at least talked to us like we're adults.
Nancy Gibbs
#24. As a candidate, Obama disdained the game of politics, a self-conscious contrast to all the tireless political athletes named Clinton.
Nancy Gibbs
#25. Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.
Nancy Gibbs
#26. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#27. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#28. A president can't go to every memorial service.
Nancy Gibbs
#29. Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they'll go and the shape they'll take.
Nancy Gibbs
#30. While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.
Nancy Gibbs
#31. Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.
Nancy Gibbs
#32. Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.
Nancy Gibbs
#33. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#34. Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Nancy Gibbs
#35. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#37. There's a smartphone gait: the slow sidewalk weave that comes from being lost in conversation rather than looking where you're going.
Nancy Gibbs
#38. Hillary Clinton wants to leave behind No Child Left Behind.
Nancy Gibbs
#39. I have two daughters: One an open book, one a locked box. So the question of privacy is a challenging one. How much do kids need? How much should we give? How do we prepare them to live in a world where the very notion of privacy opens a generational chasm?
Nancy Gibbs
#40. It's no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets.
Nancy Gibbs
#41. What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.
Nancy Gibbs
#42. Time dissolves in summer anyway: days are long, weekends longer. Hours get all thin and watery when you are lost in the book you'd never otherwise have time to read. Senses are sharper - something about the moist air and bright light and fruit in season - and so memories stir and startle.
Nancy Gibbs
#43. While we meant to invite debate about some ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice.
Nancy Gibbs
#44. I like the fact that glass ceilings are breaking all over.
Nancy Gibbs
#45. Rooting from the sidelines is the most democratic of sporting rites: no skyboxes, no tickets required, just an unabashed will to holler and wave.
Nancy Gibbs
#46. A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon.
Nancy Gibbs
#47. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#48. 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?
Nancy Gibbs
#49. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#50. Obama was elected on a slogan of hope and change because both were in short supply: the military exhausted by two wars, the banks failing their public trust, the U.S. Congress a comedy of dysfunction, and a federal government that seemed designed to idle on the sidelines.
Nancy Gibbs
#51. Years later, nothing makes me more grateful as a parent than my daughters' encounters with classroom wizards.
Nancy Gibbs
#52. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#53. When you are a media celebrity, every word you speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak.
Nancy Gibbs
#54. It's always been a luxury to be able to hop a plane to Paris, to Venice, to the Grand Canyon.
Nancy Gibbs
#55. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#56. It's hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones.
Nancy Gibbs
#57. Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.
Nancy Gibbs
#58. Summer is not obligatory. We can start an infernally hard jigsaw puzzle in June with the knowledge that, if there are enough rainy days, we may just finish it by Labor Day, but if not, there's no harm, no penalty. We may have better things to do.
Nancy Gibbs
#59. All wars, even the noblest, bring a reckoning of means and ends.
Nancy Gibbs
#60. Whatever people thought the first time they held a portable phone the size of a shoe in their hands, it was nothing like where we are now, accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips.
Nancy Gibbs
#61. Americans are grateful for the connection and convenience their phones provide, helping them search for a lower price, navigate a strange city, expand a customer base or track their health and finances, their family and friends.
Nancy Gibbs
#62. Decision making in a democracy depends above all on knowledge and not just the intel available to presidents and policymakers.
Nancy Gibbs
#63. 'Sesame Street's' genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things - death, divorce, danger - in terms that children understand and accept.
Nancy Gibbs
#64. Presidents make their hard decisions and then abide forever with their mistakes and regrets.
Nancy Gibbs
#65. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#66. In design as in life, smart can also mean wise, kind, inspiring - and cost-effective. And that has a charm all its own.
Nancy Gibbs
#67. I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' But Valentine's Day leaves me cold.
Nancy Gibbs
#68. The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
Nancy Gibbs
#69. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#70. Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.
Nancy Gibbs
#71. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#72. Bill Clinton left office with a more than 60% approval rating.
Nancy Gibbs
#74. If Heaven is willing to sing to us, it is little to ask that we be ready to listen.
Nancy Gibbs
#75. Calling Rand Paul 'the most interesting man in politics' is an invitation to an argument - but one we suspect he'd love to have.
Nancy Gibbs
#76. I come from a family of teachers, and I believe ideas matter; the good ones deserve reverence, and the bad ones, defiance.
Nancy Gibbs
#77. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#78. In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.
Nancy Gibbs
#79. Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.
Nancy Gibbs
#80. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#81. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#82. You can't predict when a crisis might hit your family, whether it's with an elderly parent or with your children.
Nancy Gibbs
#83. People don't blame the act of driving for auto accidents.
Nancy Gibbs
#84. Some people are born strong or stretchy, or with a tungsten will.
Nancy Gibbs
#85. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#86. There may be no less original idea than the notion that our hearts hold dominion over our heads.
Nancy Gibbs
#87. The crossroads of science and politics is a dodgy place.
Nancy Gibbs
#88. His manner somehow friendly and courtly at the same time.
Nancy Gibbs
#89. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#90. If boomers were always looking to shock, millennials are eager to share.
Nancy Gibbs
#91. Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.
Nancy Gibbs
#92. The real luxury travel of the modern age is not through space; it's through time.
Nancy Gibbs
#93. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#94. Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war - and the troubles that flow from it.
Nancy Gibbs
#95. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#96. I've been grateful that 'Time's' reach and mandate is so broad; anything you're interested in, you can usually write about.
Nancy Gibbs
#97. 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.
Nancy Gibbs
#98. George W. Bush, though a president's son, is cast as Reagan's heir even more than his father's.
Nancy Gibbs
#99. In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.
Nancy Gibbs
#100. High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others.
Nancy Gibbs
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