Katharine Graham

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

“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.”

“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.”

“A mistake is simply another way of doing things.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Dean Acheson was one of the very best and brightest of the men who ever came to Washington.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In large families, it seems it is hardest to be either the first or the last child. That was certainly true in ours.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One doesn't soon forget the natural beauty of Washington, although those of us who live here do sometimes take it for granted.”