Katharine Graham

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique.

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.

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

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.