86 Quotes by Katharine Graham

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.