Katharine Graham Quotes

News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.

Democracy depends on information circulating freely in society.

A mistake is simply another way of doing things

The thing women must do to rise to power is to redefine their femininity. Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact power has no sex.

To love what you do and feel that it matters - how could anything be more fun?

Truth and news are not the same thing.

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. 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.

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.

Some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn.

The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don't print matter a lot.

No one can avoid aging, but aging productively is something else.

I always thought if you worked hard enough and tried hard enough, things would work out. I was wrong.

Whatever power I exert is collegial.

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

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.

I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful.

To me, working is a form of sustenance, like food or water, and nearly as essential.

If one is rich and one's a woman, one can be quite misunderstood.

So few grown women like their lives.

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.

For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown. ... It is a city that offers me more people -- more different kinds of people -- than I could otherwise possibly have come to know in a lifetime: the native Washingtonian, the local merchant, the foreign diplomat, the ever-present tourist, the public servant, the journalist, the president, the friend.

The Montessori Method- learning by doing-once again became my stock in trade.

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.