Tina Brown Quotes

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

Tina Brown

#2. 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.

Tina Brown

#3. 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.

Tina Brown

#4. 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.

Tina Brown

#5. It's so thrilling to be intimidated.

Tina Brown

#6. 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.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#8. 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.

Tina Brown

#9. Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre.

Tina Brown

#10. 'Vogue' celebrates plenty of women of substance.

Tina Brown

#11. 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.

Tina Brown

#12. Does Obama create confusion on purpose?

Tina Brown

#13. Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#15. I just wanted to have fun for myself - I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#17. In the end, Dan Rather's legend skewered him, CBS and the craft of journalism.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#19. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar turned out to be all hat and no cattle with his sorry oversight of the Minerals Management Service.

Tina Brown

#20. Perhaps it's time to stop analyzing Sarah Palin as a politician. Maybe, in her own muddled way, she is at last owning up to the fact that she has been miscast. You don't need politics anymore once you've discovered that the alchemy of celebrity has turned you into a 24-carat phenomenon.

Tina Brown

#21. 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.

Tina Brown

#22. What has happened to America's survival instincts?

Tina Brown

#23. Plenty of couples snipe at each other in sometimes embarrassing ways in front of company.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#25. In today's gig economy, where jobs have been replaced by 'portfolios of projects,' most people find themselves doing more things less well for two-thirds of the money.

Tina Brown

#26. Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies.

Tina Brown

#27. Goals that are not frightening are not worth having.

Tina Brown

#28. To win respect, the networks seem to feel they have to keep absurdly overstating their anchors' reporting cred.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#30. There is nobody more boring than the undefeated.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#32. 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.

Tina Brown

#33. 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.

Tina Brown

#34. 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.

Tina Brown

#35. 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.

Tina Brown

#36. After so much reality TV and confessional celebrity interviews, the public is tired of accessible stars. Who needs them to be 'Just Like Us?' 'Just Like Us' means just as boring as we are.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#40. When Obama heralds another 'teachable moment,' it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.

Tina Brown

#41. 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?

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#43. Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton.

Tina Brown

#44. The most frequent thing people said to me about Princess Diana when I was conducting interviews for my biography was that she could create a circle of intimacy in the middle of a crowd.

Tina Brown

#45. I don't actually go to newsstands anymore.

Tina Brown

#46. Perhaps Obama is often slow to nail controversies because he needs time to live inside them for a while in his head. It's unnerving for the rest of us, but even the haters, one feels, are made to think more deeply than they'd like before they return to the bickering and the games.

Tina Brown

#47. 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.

Tina Brown

#48. 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.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#50. 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.

Tina Brown

#51. We live in a culture of destructive transparency.

Tina Brown

#52. Clinton passed his first budget without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Before it led to the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, it led to a Democratic defeat in the 1994 midterms.

Tina Brown

#53. Whether it's in Washington, or whether it's with the mothers of extremists, or whether it's education in places like Pakistan ... a lot of women in these emerging countries are taking charge and doing amazing things.

Tina Brown

#54. Servility always curdles into rage in the end.

Tina Brown

#55. Everyone is someone else's catalyst for selling something these days.

Tina Brown

#56. Obama has figured out the best method to prepare the way for his verbal Houdini acts: Use political noise as the tune-up din before the aria. Perhaps his body temperature is so low, it sometimes takes him too long to break out the song.

Tina Brown

#57. 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.

Tina Brown

#58. 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.

Tina Brown

#59. 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.

Tina Brown

#60. I'm impressed with how 'Newsweek's' outstanding staff has continued to put out a lively, well-informed magazine after the departure of their tireless editor, Jon Meacham.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#62. 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.

Tina Brown

#63. 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.

Tina Brown

#64. A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

Tina Brown

#65. Manners are the ability to put someone else at their ease ... by turning any answer into another question.

Tina Brown

#66. 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.

Tina Brown

#67. Disinterested public service has become, just so ... what's the phrase, 'old school.'

Tina Brown

#68. If you are setting a goal without understanding the reason for it, then maybe you should reevaluate the goal in general.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#70. 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.

Tina Brown

#71. It's almost as if Putin is brilliant, really - he's outfoxing Obama all the time.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#73. Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

Tina Brown

#74. Let's face it: innovation in the U.S. is now the province of our thriving city-states. We all know that nothing happens in Washington anymore.

Tina Brown

#75. The digitally native generation has no idea what has been lost to the freedom of intimacy that has no fear of being recorded.

Tina Brown

#76. 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.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#78. Hide from change and it will hide from you

Tina Brown

#79. The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet's permission, so is courage.

Tina Brown

#80. 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.

Tina Brown

#81. Wearing hats has become like fine art for me.

Tina Brown

#82. 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.

Tina Brown

#83. In the world of screens, we're all tired of screens. That's why I think that live events have become so popular.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#88. 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.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#90. When Obama dispenses with that dread sobriquet 'professorial,' he does it by being, well, more professorial.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#92. The cloud that descended on Black Rock on Monday was not for the past but the future. How much will this debacle chill the pursuit of other risky investigations?

Tina Brown

#93. Even as the whole world tries to hang on to its job, there is also this weird parallel sense - almost a covert longing - that the old corrupt structures on which that job depends needs to be, ought to be, swept away.

Tina Brown

#94. 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.

Tina Brown

#95. CBS's Ed Murrow may have been over-celebrated as the principled observer for the masses, fair yet unafraid to take on the bullies.

Tina Brown

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

Tina Brown

#97. Nothing is better for a young journalist than to go and write about something that other people don't know about. If you can afford to send yourself to some foreign part, I still think that's by far the best way to break in.

Tina Brown

#98. Economics has become as riveting as politics.

Tina Brown

#99. 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.

Tina Brown

#100. The post-presidency, as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have proved, is a win-win. Money, Nobels, the ability to leverage your global celebrity for any cause or hobbyhorse you wish, plus freedom to grab the mike whenever the urge takes you without any terminal repercussions.

Tina Brown