Nancy Gibbs Quotes
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Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
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In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.
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Rand Paul does not like being compared to his father Ron any more than sons named Bush like to dance in their father's shadow, but the crucial difference is that while the Bushes all hail from the relative mainstream of the GOP, the Pauls have an ideological tributary virtually to themselves.
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There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.
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In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.
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Modesty means admitting the possibility of error, subsuming the self for the good of the whole, remaining open to surprise and the gifts that only failure can bring. There are many ways to practice it. Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager.
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The crossroads of science and politics is a dodgy place.
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Back in the really olden days, dinner was seldom a ceremonial event for U.S. families. Only the very wealthy had a separate dining room. For most, meals were informal, a kind of rolling refueling; often only the men sat down.
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I don't think it's necessary to shout if you have a good story. But I also don't think you should shy away from being bold in the statement that you're making.
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Death will never be pretty - its sights and smells too close and crude. And it will never come under our control: it gallops where we tiptoe, rips up our routines, burns our very breath with its heat and sting.
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Calling Rand Paul 'the most interesting man in politics' is an invitation to an argument - but one we suspect he'd love to have.
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After 9/11, whatever the evidence of intelligence failures, many people still saw that attack as almost unimaginable, so brutal and brazen an assault.
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Presidents make their hard decisions and then abide forever with their mistakes and regrets.
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Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.
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High school is a haunted house in April, when seniors act up because the end is near. Even those who hate school sometimes cling to the devil they know. And for the kids who love it, the goodbyes are hard to think about.
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Obama promised a return to competence and confidence and asked the nation to believe again that the government could do big things well. In the end, he got his big thing, a once-in-a-generation revision to the basic social compact, a commitment of health coverage to nearly all Americans. He has yet to prove he can do it well.
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Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they'll go and the shape they'll take.
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There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.
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I live in a dumb house. Which is not to say that I don't love its quirky charm, its drafty windows and leaky fireplaces and an electrical system that protests when too many people are trying to vacuum and microwave at the same time. But charm is not always user-friendly.
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There's a smartphone gait: the slow sidewalk weave that comes from being lost in conversation rather than looking where you're going.
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I like the fact that glass ceilings are breaking all over.
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There was a time when researchers imagined that Plan B, or the morning-after pill, might become not an emergency form of contraception but a routine one; women would take it once a month to induce a period and never even know whether they had gotten pregnant.
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Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
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Our children will outwit us if they want; for when it comes to technology, they hold the higher ground. Unlike other tools passed carefully and ceremonially from one generation to the next - the sharp scissors, the car keys - this is one they understand better than we do.