Nancy Gibbs Quotes
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The 1950s felt so safe and smug, the '60s so raw and raucous, the revolutions stacked one on top of another, in race relations, gender roles, generational conflict, the clash of church and state - so many values and vanities tossed on the bonfire, and no one had a concordance to explain why it was all happening at once.
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On a normal day, we value heroism because it is uncommon. On Sept. 11, we valued heroism because it was everywhere.
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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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We want laws to be applied predictably.
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War is being waged all across the country against the invasive plant and animal species - some 50,000 of them - now spreading across the U.S.
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My husband and I don't have sons, so we never had to ask ourselves how we'd have felt about them playing football.
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Rooting from the sidelines is the most democratic of sporting rites: no skyboxes, no tickets required, just an unabashed will to holler and wave.
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Right now, doctors can test for about 2,500 medical conditions, but they only can treat about 500 of those. So what do you do with the knowledge about the others?
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I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' But Valentine's Day leaves me cold.
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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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When you are a media celebrity, every word you speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak.
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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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It's the experts in adolescent development who wax most emphatic about the value of family meals, for it's in the teenage years that this daily investment pays some of its biggest dividends.
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Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting.
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You can't hold up a blog; you can hold up a magazine.
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A president can't go to every memorial service.
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'Sesame Street's' genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things - death, divorce, danger - in terms that children understand and accept.
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Time is valuable; people are busy.
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Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.
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Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.
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The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.
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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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Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.
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There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.