Tina Brown

“I haven't spent years, like Alyse Nelson of Vital Voices, toiling for female economic empowerment on five continents.”

“Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.”

“Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that's no excuse.”

“Feminism in some ways has become quite dormant.”

“A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'”

“What America is thirsting for now is a battalion of strong, down-to-earth 'doers' - managers, frontline activists, business and social entrepreneurs engaged in tackling America's manifold problems of unemployment, education, and competitive slouch.”

“Interior Secretary Ken Salazar turned out to be all hat and no cattle with his sorry oversight of the Minerals Management Service.”

“I wish my daughter wasn't spending time thinking of Kim Kardashian or Rihanna.”

“Even as the whole world tries to hang on to its job, there is also this weird parallel sense - almost a covert longing - that the old corrupt structures on which that job depends needs to be, ought to be, swept away.”

“If you are setting a goal without understanding the reason for it, then maybe you should reevaluate the goal in general.”

“It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama's meager resume - 'a mere community organizer!' - before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama's experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.”

“There is nobody more boring than the undefeated.”

“Being president, you may have more power than anyone else in the country, but you quickly discover that you have much, much less than you thought you'd have going in. You're hamstrung in ways you never dreamed of.”

“By the end of 'Game Change,' one feels that the candidates' few happy moments are those when they 'lose it.'”

“In all the debate about Afghanistan, we don't hear much about our obligation to the wretched lives of Afghan women. They are being treated as collateral damage as the big boys discuss geopolitical goals.”

“I know as much as anyone how much her most fervent supporters want Hillary Clinton to run for president.”

“Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.”

“The comptroller of New York City ought to have all the characteristics of a major corporation's CFO - quiet rigor, obsessive care for detail, incorruptible judgment, an ability to work assiduously behind the scenes with the key stakeholders.”

“The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all. Everyone is under too much scrutiny now to take a chance on candidates who suddenly blow up into a comic meme, a punchline, a ribald hashtag.”

“It's so thrilling to be intimidated.”