Katharine Graham

No one can avoid aging, but aging productively is something else

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

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

I love Martha's Vineyard, where I have had a house for thirty years. I have loved visiting countries around the world. But I always come home to Washington.

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.

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

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

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.

One of my principal childhood memories is hearing one of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies waft throughout the house.

No one can avoid aging, but aging productively is something else.

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.

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.

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

Mountain climbing was one of Mother's favorite occupations, but she never succeeded in inculcating this passion in any of us.

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.

I believed - and believe - that capitalism works best for a freedom-loving society, that it brings more prosperity to more people than any other social-economic system, but that somehow we have to take care of people.

A mistake is simply another way of doing things.

My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did.

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.

So few grown women like their lives.

For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown. My whole orientation is toward this place.

In my first year or so at the 'Post,' I began to write with some frequency on the least important issues - so-called light editorials. The titles themselves are revealing of just how light: 'On Being a Horse,' 'Brains and Beauty,' 'Mixed Drinks,' 'Lou Gehrig,' and 'Spotted Fever.'

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.

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.

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.

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

I didn't really want deadlines and editorial work. I wanted something mechanical and eight hours a day. So I went to work, thinking it was easy - ha, ha - on the complaint desk at the circulation department.