Quotes from Katharine Graham

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.

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.

Truth and news are not the same thing.

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.

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

It took me a while to learn that certain people may have important skills that are not always blazingly apparent. Gradually I came to realize - slow as I may have been - that what mattered was performance, that sometimes people might have to be helped to develop, and that it takes all kinds to make an organization run properly.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

When I say we do not

and just when I was ready to hit him, he'd laugh in that way of his to let me know he loved me. And he made me a better man.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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