Top 61 Katharine Graham Quotes
#1. When Newsweek owner Katharine Graham heard about our lawsuit, she asked, Which side am I supposed to be on?
Lynn Povich
#2. My mother seemed to undermine so much of what I did, subtly belittling my choices and my activities in light of her greater, more important ones.
Katharine Graham
#3. Those first few years of marriage, before the war interrupted all our lives, Phil and I had a very happy time. I grew up considerably, mostly thanks to him.
Katharine Graham
#4. In Washington, the public and the private intertwine in such a way that they can't be easily separated. This is the city where the personal and the political are most closely linked.
Katharine Graham
#5. 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
#6. I always liked Barbara Howar and admired her spunk. I know that she considered me - and Alice Roosevelt Longworth - an exception to her negative feelings about Washington widows and single women, whom she basically found dispensable.
Katharine Graham
#7. Mother set impossibly high standards for us, creating tremendous pressures and undermining our ability to accomplish whatever modest aims we may have set for ourselves.
Katharine Graham
#8. The organization that I joined when I went to work, the trade association called the Bureau of Advertising, became the first of many over the years in which I was the only woman.
Katharine Graham
#9. 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
#10. In large families, it seems it is hardest to be either the first or the last child. That was certainly true in ours.
Katharine Graham
#11. 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
#12. Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstance, you have to remake your life.
Katharine Graham
#13. The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is the most debilitating to the person who bears it.
Katharine Graham
#14. I certainly didn't understand something that I learned later from Dr. Kay Jamison, the author of An Unquiet Mind, about her own manic-depression. She has written that it is a lethal illness, particularly if left untreated, or wrongly treated.
Katharine Graham
#16. The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don't print matter a lot.
Katharine Graham
#17. 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
#18. My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did.
Katharine Graham
#19. I believed - and believe - that capitalism works best for a freedom-loving society, that it brings more prosperity to more people than any other social-economic system, but that somehow we have to take care of people.
Katharine Graham
#20. Potomac School proved to be my first big adjustment - one that helped me with a basic lesson of growing up: learning to get along in whatever world one is deposited.
Katharine Graham
#21. I always thought if you worked hard enough and tried hard enough, things would work out. I was wrong.
Katharine Graham
#22. I remember the Washington in which I grew up as a genuine small town. Maybe this is true for everyone, that we all feel that the times in which we grew up were simpler, less complex.
Katharine Graham
#23. The image of me as someone who likes or can deal with a fight is wrong. Some people enjoy competition and dustups, and I wish I did, but I don't. But once you have started down a path, then I think you have to move forward. You can't give up.
Katharine Graham
#24. 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
#25. One doesn't soon forget the natural beauty of Washington, although those of us who live here do sometimes take it for granted.
Katharine Graham
#26. I believe ... that education is not only the most important societal problem but the most interesting.
Katharine Graham
#27. If one is rich and one's a woman, one can be quite misunderstood.
Katharine Graham
#28. To me, working is a form of sustenance, like food or water, and nearly as essential.
Katharine Graham
#29. What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes and step off the ledge. The surprise was that I landed on my feet.
Katharine Graham
#30. 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
#31. I truly believed that other people in my position didn't make mistakes; I couldn't see that everybody makes them, even people with great experience.
Katharine Graham
#33. Mountain climbing was one of Mother's favorite occupations, but she never succeeded in inculcating this passion in any of us.
Katharine Graham
#34. Family ownership provides the independence that is sometimes required to withstand governmental pressure and preserve freedom of the press.
Katharine Graham
#35. For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown. My whole orientation is toward this place.
Katharine Graham
#36. Alice Roosevelt Longworth was only a few years older than my mother but outlived her by a decade, dying in 1980. From the time they met, in 1917, they were lifelong friends of sorts, though each was a bit wary of the other.
Katharine Graham
#37. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.
Katharine Graham
#38. If we had failed to pursue the facts as far as they led, we would have denied the public any knowledge of an unprecedented scheme of political surveillance and sabotage.
Katharine Graham
#39. There have been two periods in my lifetime when the excitement of government and of public issues drew to Washington many of the bright young people graduating from colleges and law schools. These were essentially the Roosevelt and the Kennedy years.
Katharine Graham
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique.
Katharine Graham
#43. I love Martha's Vineyard, where I have had a house for thirty years. I have loved visiting countries around the world. But I always come home to Washington.
Katharine Graham
#44. One of my principal childhood memories is hearing one of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies waft throughout the house.
Katharine Graham
#45. I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.
Katharine Graham
#46. At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man's world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries. But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere.
Katharine Graham
#47. News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.
Katharine Graham
#48. The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome.
Katharine Graham
#49. In my first year or so at the 'Post,' I began to write with some frequency on the least important issues - so-called light editorials. The titles themselves are revealing of just how light: 'On Being a Horse,' 'Brains and Beauty,' 'Mixed Drinks,' 'Lou Gehrig,' and 'Spotted Fever.'
Katharine Graham
#50. When it comes to Washington, most people tend to think first of politics. But Washington is also a geographic and physical place. It is, for instance, one of the few cities of the world where you can talk endlessly about trees.
Katharine Graham
#51. 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
#52. There is a saying about relationships in Washington: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Katharine Graham
#53. No one can avoid aging, but aging productively is something else.
Katharine Graham
#54. There seems to me nothing very bad about a nation's capital having good intentions - and when the intentions are magnificent, so much the better.
Katharine Graham
#55. To me, involvement with news is absolutely inebriating. It's what makes my life exciting.
Katharine Graham
#56. Dean Acheson was one of the very best and brightest of the men who ever came to Washington.
Katharine Graham
#57. Some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn.
Katharine Graham
#58. Although at the time I didn't realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase, 'If it's all right with you.' If I thought I'd done anything to make someone unhappy, I'd agonize.
Katharine Graham
#59. The Montessori Method- learning by doing-once again became my stock in trade ...
Katharine Graham
#61. I didn't really want deadlines and editorial work. I wanted something mechanical and eight hours a day. So I went to work, thinking it was easy - ha, ha - on the complaint desk at the circulation department.
Katharine Graham
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