Katharine Graham Quotes

100 Katharine Graham Quotes (Katherine Graham Quotes, Kay Graham)

1 2 3



A long time ago I had to decide whether to be a lady who lunched or a women who worked.
Katharine Graham

We’ll all learn a lot more if you stop talking.
Katharine Graham

A mistake is simply another way of doing things.
Katharine Graham

The real world in which we work is neither evil nor heroic. It is the same environment of conflict, ambiguity and hard choices that mark most enterprises in our time.
Katharine Graham

I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn.
Katharine Graham

I like a mans world.
Katharine Graham

Responsible union members do not set fires or beat fellow workers or make midnight phone calls threatening to kill the wives and infants of their fellow workers.
Katharine Graham

I always thought if you worked hard enough and tried hard enough, things would work out.
Katharine Graham

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

The truth is, I never felt there was much choice… Once I found myself in the deepest water in the middle of the current, there was no going back.
Katharine Graham



Some questions don’t have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn.
Katharine Graham

Common humor is very basic, isn’t it? At both the [Washington] Post and Newsweek there’s a rather great, healthy irreverence that makes working a lot of fun.
Katharine Graham

[On listing the company the stock exchange] Do I really have to make my salary public?
Katharine Graham

[On her mother she] Came on so strong you wilted.
Katharine Graham

I didn’t know we were rich any more than I knew we were Jewish.
Katharine Graham

It’s dangerous when you are older to start living in the past.
Katharine Graham

I’d led what I thought of as two separate lives. Wife and mother for twenty-three years, and then working person for thirty.
Katharine Graham

[On the Washington Post] This has been, this is, and this will continue to be a family operation. There is another generation coming, and we intend to turn the paper over to them.
Katharine Graham

They just wanted to sound you out.
Katharine Graham

My mother’s maternal instincts were less well developed than her artistic ones.
Katharine Graham



[As a child to her mother] Could the children make appointments to see her?
Katharine Graham

You’re asking me to do something over the phone that the New York Times took three months to do?
Katharine Graham

[On being giving opposite advice by her lawyer and her trusted editors] I took a big gulp and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.’
Katharine Graham

I know I speak for all of us when I say what a great moment this is for the Washington Post.
Katharine Graham

It is the long-standing policy of the Post Company to enlist in each of its enterprises the best professional journalists we can find and give them a maximum of freedom in which to work.
Katharine Graham

Each branch if operated autonomously. They compete vigorously… We think that the result is journalism of a high caliber.
Katharine Graham

If you were a woman in those days at the head of an organization people were entirely unused to you and didn’t know what to make of you. I had to care about what Wall Street thought about us for the first time.
Katharine Graham

We were lucky… we had been able to take some chances like the Pentagon Papers, which was a risk because we were a two-share company and the family had the controlling shares.
Katharine Graham

Because I still had vast problems with self-confidence in public situations, I feared dealing with the industry and with Wall Street, especially the excruciating ordeal of speaking to financial analysts.
Katharine Graham

[She hated] Huckstering her paper and her stock.
Katharine Graham



One hears a certain amount of conversation about whether our commitment to journalistic excellence and integrity is consistent with our commitment to profitability. I can assure you that it is. In fact, you cannot have one without the other. And as you improve the one, you can always improve the other.
Katharine Graham

This bastard is f*cking things up.
Katharine Graham

If Ben [Bradlee] need his Sally [Quinn] to be a good editor, as Grant needed his liquor to be a good general, then so be it.
Katharine Graham

I lay awake many nights worrying, though not about my personal safety.
Katharine Graham

When are we going to find all the truth?… Don’t tell me never.
Katharine Graham

We don’t want anyone to see we’re celebrating…
Katharine Graham

Courage applies when one has a choice.
Katharine Graham

I know I’m No. 1 because you are No. 1. You know that I know that I am No. 1 because you are No. 1.
Katharine Graham

[The press] Is not a fourth branch of government, the press plays an essential role in ‘obliging the government to control itself.’ And if we do not serve in this way, the rest of the rights guaranteed by our Constitution cannot be sustained.
Katharine Graham

Discipline was the objective. It’s a messy organization chart, but it works.
Katharine Graham



1 2 3


Return from Katharine Graham Quotes to Quoteswise.com