Top 35 Katharine Graham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Truth and news are not the same thing.”

— Katharine Graham

2. “To love what you do and feel that it matters – how could anything be more fun?”

— Katharine Graham

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3. “News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.”

— Katharine Graham

4. “Some questions don’t have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn.”

— Katharine Graham

5. “A mistake is simply another way of doing things.”

— Katharine Graham

6. “We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

— Katharine Graham

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

— Katharine Graham

8. “The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is the most debilitating to the person who bears it.”

— Katharine Graham

9. “Democracy depends on information circulating freely in society.”

— Katharine Graham

10. “I always thought if you worked hard enough and tried hard enough, things would work out. I was wrong.”

— Katharine Graham

11. “The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don’t print matter a lot.”

— Katharine Graham

12. “What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes and step off the ledge. The surprise was that I landed on my feet.”

— Katharine Graham

13. “When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word -religion. Then I go out and paint the stars. -Vincent Van Gogh A mistake is simply another way of doing things.”

— Katharine Graham

14. “To me, working is a form of sustenance, like food or water, and nearly as essential.”

— Katharine Graham

15. “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

16. “The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish.”

— Katharine Graham

17. “The Montessori Method- learning by doing-once again became my stock in trade...”

— Katharine Graham

18. “If one is rich and one’s a woman, one can be quite misunderstood.”

— Katharine Graham

19. “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.”

— Katharine Graham

20. “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

21. “Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstance, you have to remake your life.”

— Katharine Graham

22. “Whatever power I exert is collegial.”

— Katharine Graham

23. “The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock.”

— Katharine Graham

24. “In Washington, the public and the private intertwine in such a way that they can’t be easily separated. This is the city where the personal and the political are most closely linked.”

— Katharine Graham

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “So few grown women like their lives.”

— Katharine Graham

29. “There is a saying about relationships in Washington: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

— Katharine Graham

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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