Top 22 Katharine Graham Quotes

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 me, involvement with news is absolutely inebriating. It’s what makes my life exciting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of my principal childhood memories is hearing one of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies waft throughout the house.

Family ownership provides the independence that is sometimes required to withstand governmental pressure and preserve freedom of the press.

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.

So few grown women like their lives.

Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

Mountain climbing was one of Mother’s favorite occupations, but she never succeeded in inculcating this passion in any of us.