Quotes from Katharine Graham

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.

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

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.

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.

When in 1969 I became publisher of the 'Washington Post' as well as president of the company, my plate was fuller than ever. I had partly worked myself into the job but not, except for rare occasions, taken hold. I had acquired some sense of business but still relied on others more than most company presidents did.

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.

A mistake is simply another way of doing things.

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

Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstance, you have to remake your life.

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.

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.

What the president never accepted, or even clearly understood – as most people don't understand – is the autonomy editors have, and must have, to produce a good newspaper. I used to describe it as liberty, not license.

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.

I believe...that education is not only the most important societal problem but the most interesting.

People react in such complicated ways to any death, but particularly to the death of a parent, because a lot of what one feels is about oneself and the sense that nothing now stands between that self and dying. You have now become the older generation. I believe that the closer and more loving the relationship is, the deeper but simpler the grief. Of my father's children, my brother had the hardest time

When you've lived alone for a number of years I'm afraid that you begin to realize how hard it would be to accommodate to living with someone else. Adjusting to or even indulging his desires and his life. It was clear to me that I was married to my job. And that I loved it.

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.

There is a saying about relationships in Washington: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

The more subtle inheritance of my strange childhood was the feeling, which we all shared to some extent, of believing we were never quite going about things correctly. Had I said the right thing? Had I worn the right clothes? Was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self-absorbing, even overwhelming at times, and remained so throughout much of my adult life, until, at last, I grew impatient with dwelling on the past.

The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish.

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.

Who is going to influence whom in the new association? Warren may have entered the ocean in California, but I am sitting down in Virginia with Ben Graham's beginner's book and "How to Read a Financial Report" by someone called Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith. I am told I have to finish Ben Graham very soon because Warren is unwilling to pay the small fine involved in having the book out of the Omaha public library too long.

I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn. What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge.

I resigned myself quite contentedly to the life of a vegetable. I went to cooking school in the morning, had lunch with friends, sat in the sun with other pregnant ladies, talked, gossiped, did everything in short that's in the books including laying out my husband's slippers and smoking jacket. (I'm serious I assure you.) And the funniest part of all is that I liked it.