Personal History Quotes

“The nicest thing you did was to take me seriously when a lot of people wouldn’t have, but not too seriously, which was just right.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“What the president never accepted, or even clearly understood – as most people don't understand – is the autonomy editors have, and must have, to produce a good newspaper. I used to describe it as liberty, not license.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“I believe...that education is not only the most important societal problem but the most interesting.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“When you've lived alone for a number of years I'm afraid that you begin to realize how hard it would be to accommodate to living with someone else. Adjusting to or even indulging his desires and his life. It was clear to me that I was married to my job. And that I loved it.”
― Katharine Graham, 我的一生略小于美国现代史：凯瑟琳·格雷厄姆自传

“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”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“There is a saying about relationships in Washington: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“I resigned myself quite contentedly to the life of a vegetable. I went to cooking school in the morning, had lunch with friends, sat in the sun with other pregnant ladies, talked, gossiped, did everything in short that’s in the books including laying out my husband’s slippers and smoking jacket. (I’m serious I assure you.) And the funniest part of all is that I liked it.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“The editorial—written by a liberated man—suggested legal and social remedies but concluded that “perhaps we can begin with the ultra-radical notion that a woman is a human being.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“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.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“He left only a small office for his personal business and several people who worked for him buying and selling stocks and paying taxes. In 1917, we were occupying the entire top floor and half of the floor below at 820 Fifth Avenue, which is where I was born. We—“the babes,” as Mother often referred to us in her diary—lived with Powelly in this Fifth Avenue apartment. A governess, Anna Otth, had been added after Bill was born. I can’t remember the years in New York, and since I was a baby, those very early years of separation and substitute parenting had the least effect on me of any of the children. Only psychiatrists can guess about their effect on my older siblings. Much later, my brother, when he was in the process of being analyzed to become a psychoanalyst himself, got very angry thinking about the separation and testily asked my mother how she could have left her children in New York for those early years. She said, “Well, you were all in school.” But the older children were two, four, and six, and I was a few months old, when our parents first left for Washington. WHEN SHE WENT to Washington, my mother’s life changed drastically—and for the better. She was part of a team for the first time, going into a strange city in which she and my father were both new. There seems to have been less anti-Semitic prejudice in Washington than in New York. And in Washington, unlike the many women who to this day find the city distasteful because they are regarded as appendages of their husbands, my mother found a wide canvas on which to paint. She continued to maintain her old interests, particularly in Chinese art, even admitting in her autobiography that “I was so engrossed in translating Chinese texts and in writing a book on the philosophy of Chinese art that it never occurred to me to make any active contribution toward the war effort. In plain truth I sat out the First World War.” At the same time, however, she threw herself into Washington’s social life in a determined way, partly because she enjoyed it but also because she saw immersion in social life as the way she could help further my father’s interests. Mother began another diary at the time they moved to Washington, which makes it clear how devoted she was to him. She often worried that his talents weren’t sufficiently recognized, and she constantly noted the progress of his career and her faith in his abilities: “He is so big that I want him to be of more help in this terrible situation of chaos produced by incompetence and politics mixed.” Although she never quite said so, and often claimed the contrary, she clearly thrived”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“No human being can blindly accept authority in one area of life and become self-reliant in day-to-day decisions in the field of morals, politics and economics. The secular public school trains independent minds for leadership in every area of life; the parochial school trains for obedience to authority.… We must close the door tight against the present attempts of the Catholic hierarchy and reactionary Protestants to force our people to support sectarian schools whose rapid increase would destroy our secular school and tear our nation into irreconcilable factions. The costs of private and parochial education are mounting steadily. Few American girls wish to become nuns.…”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“The Kennedy men were also unabashed chauvinists, as were the great majority of men at the time, including Phil. They liked other bright men, and they liked girls, but they didn't really know how to relate to middle-aged women, in whom they didn't have a whole lot of interest. This attitude made life difficult for middle-aged wives especially, and induced--or fed--feelings of uncertainty in many of us in those years. Though the men were polite, we somehow knew we had no place in their spectrum. My ever-present terror of being boring often overwhelmed me in social situations with the president and at the White House, particularly whenever I was face to face with the president himself or one of his main advisers, and my fear was a real guarantee of being boring, since it paralyzed and silenced me.”
― Katherine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“Unfortunately, this incapacity often produced in women--as it did in me--a diffuse way of talking, an inability to be concise, a tendency to ramble, to start at the end and work backwards, to overexplain, to go on for too long, to apologize.”
― Katherine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“I often observed that at times women were invisible to men, who looked right through you as though you weren't there.”
― Katherine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“No longer would the Post write such lines as one identified by Chal Roberts in his history of the paper: “Sam Jones, 24, Negro, was arrested for larceny yesterday.” Overnight, he eliminated “freebies”—trips paid for by the government and free tickets for anything. Also, after just a few weeks on the job, he called in the police reporter, Al Lewis, to ask if he was having parking”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“hand and working to unite the country, Nixon”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“The end result of all this was that many of us, by middle age, arrived at the state we were trying most to avoid: we bored our husbands, who had done their fair share in helping reduce us to this condition, and they wandered off to younger, greener pastures.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“He was parsimonious in the extreme. Once, when we were together at an airport, I asked him for a dime to make a phone call. He started to walk some distance to get change for a quarter. “Warren,” I exclaimed, “the quarter will do,” and he sheepishly handed it over.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“One speaker after another used to start his presentation coyly by saying, “Lady and gentlemen,” or “Gentlemen and Mrs. Graham,” always with slight giggles or snickers.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“It’s hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“I certainly didn’t understand something that I learned later from Dr. Kay Jamison, the author of An Unquiet Mind, about her own manic-depression. She has written that it is “a lethal illness, particularly if left untreated, or wrongly treated.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“He, who hated to hurt people, had to begin to deal with all the hurt his actions had wrought—for me, for the children, for Robin, for himself.”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir

“When I say we do not”
― Katharine Graham, Personal History: A Memoir