Katharine Graham Quotes
100 Katharine Graham Quotes
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[On how she perceived Wall Street saw her as only after] Prizes and ego trips; that how the stock does doesn’t matter to me.
Katharine Graham
I get a lot of flak at the Post… when I talk about profitability… they think I’m some heartless bitch.
Katharine Graham
It costs plenty to put two people on a story for sixteen months, and profit making is my priority. If it weren’t, I goddamn well shouldn’t be here.
Katharine Graham
I invented a saying that has since become a bromide. I told them quality and profitability go hand in hand.
Katharine Graham
[On how some people viewed her friendship with Warren Buffett in the early days] If I used him it was sort of frowned on.
Katharine Graham
[On Warren Buffett’s impact on her life it was] Central to everything that followed.
Katharine Graham
I might really get to be the most powerful woman in whatever-it-is.
Katharine Graham
[On a strike] If a paper is struck and the other is publishing, you lose. Advertisers have to advertise and they’ll advertise in the other paper if one is publishing.
Katharine Graham
The strike was by far the worst thing that ever happened to me…
Katharine Graham
Between the rock and the hard place.
Katharine Graham
It’s okay, I’m nervous too.
Katharine Graham
Just a few days the first of the damaged presses [started again] manned by a crew of advertising salesmen and one woman. They produced over a hundred thousand copies of a very creditably printed newspaper Monday night and double that output last night.
Katharine Graham
Unquestionably legal. What has been infinitely harder for me to decide is whether we are acting in a way that is humanly right. I have thought about this long and hard, and I have concluded that we are.
Katharine Graham
If I do something unexpected, male executives tend to react more than normally by asking ‘who has gotten to her.’ I’m sure I’m too defensive about this – but I try to say very clearly where an idea comes from, even if it has been adopted by me and has become mine.
Katharine Graham
To me, involvement with news is absolutely inebriating. It’s what makes my life exciting.
Katharine Graham
[On her son Don Graham] It is logical to expect him to become publisher of the Post.
Katharine Graham
Many people, especially in government and business, assume the press is hostile, uninformed and likely to distort or sensationalize everything. Many reporters and editors, on the other hand, assume that everything secret is scandalous, and every claim of confidentiality is a cover-up.
Katharine Graham
[On a leader staying too long] It’s a pretty hairy existence, and nobody ever has it made. The minute you think you do – you don’t.
Katharine Graham
What can we do to improve this?
Katharine Graham
[In her later years at a campaign to prevent teen pregnancy] I used to be a reporter and I’m still involved in journalism.
Katharine Graham
I loved my job, I loved the paper, I loved the whole company.
Katharine Graham
[On ninety-year old Mary Bingham who was honored at a civic dinner and died on the spot after finishing a speech saying that she wanted to be taken away on a little pink cloud] Very few of us will be that lucky. I’m on the last page of my speech and I’m still here.
Katharine Graham
[On her childhood] I thought I was the peasant walking around brilliant people.
Katharine Graham
[On her mother lecturing her on menstruation] Oh Mother, that happened to me a year ago.
Katharine Graham
[On the auction of the Post in the late spring of 1933] It never occurred to me, that the buyer… could have been my father… The family was not even aware that I didn’t know.
Katharine Graham
I worked on the paper when I was young, but there was never any idea of my going on it permanently.
Katharine Graham
[On continuing to work at the Post in the editorial and circulation departments] I was pregnant and Philip was away and I was just looking for a mindless job to make the time go faster.
Katharine Graham
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… on the complaint desk…
Katharine Graham
I remember all the complains unattended to and the frustration of trying to pacify enraged subscribers…
Katharine Graham
[On being unloved by her mother but sensing that her father believed in her] That was the single most sustaining thing in my life. That was what saved me.
Katharine Graham
[On being a child] I was very shy. I was afraid to be left alone with anybody because I’d bore them. I didn’t speak when we went out…
Katharine Graham
[On Warren Buffett] He resembled no Wall street figure or business tycoon I’d ever met. Rather, he came across as corn-fed and Midwestern, but with the extraordinary combination of qualities that has appeal to me throughout my life – brains and humor. I liked him from the start.
Katharine Graham
[On her childhood] We were left to bring ourselves up emotionally and intellectually.
Katharine Graham
It’s hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was… and uneducated in even the basics of the working world.
Katharine Graham
I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn. What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge.
Katharine Graham
[On reprimanding President Lyndon B Johnson for criticizing his wife in her presence and reminding him that Lady Bird] Got you where you are today… [And when he continued she politely but firmly said to] Shut up.
Katharine Graham
The material in the Pentagon Papers was just the kind of information the public needed in order to form its opinions and make its choices more wisely.
Katharine Graham
[On Mortimer Adler’s legendary ‘Great Books’ course] The methods they used often taught you most about standing up, about challenging them and fundamentally pleasing [the teachers] by doing it with gusto and verve, so that they were amused.
Katharine Graham
In proportion to our lack of experience we of the younger generation contributed heat and dogmatic assertions to these discussions, whatever the topic. The noise at our table was often such that nervous indigestion and sometimes a manifest tremor were the unhappy fate of the timid guest who took things too seriously.
Katharine Graham
[On the title of her first writing piece for The Tatler in Feburary 1933] How to think and be successful: By one who doesn’t and isn’t.
Katharine Graham
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