Nancy Gibbs Quotes
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Presidents make their hard decisions and then abide forever with their mistakes and regrets.
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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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Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.
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Obama was elected on a slogan of hope and change because both were in short supply: the military exhausted by two wars, the banks failing their public trust, the U.S. Congress a comedy of dysfunction, and a federal government that seemed designed to idle on the sidelines.
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Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.
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While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.
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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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It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.
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Sure, we want to know what a president believes in... but that doesn't always mean he should tell us.
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Anyone with the right mix of parental paranoia and entrepreneurial moxie can make a fortune by selling parents the equipment we think will keep us one step ahead of our kids.
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When National Guardsmen shot four unarmed students at Kent State, virtually the entire system of higher education shuddered and stopped.
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Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what's left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school.
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What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.
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Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.
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The crossroads of science and politics is a dodgy place.
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The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
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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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Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you're not looking.
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Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war - and the troubles that flow from it.
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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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It is actually the neuroscientists and evolutionists who do the best job of explaining the reasons behind the most unreasonable behavior.
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The Reverend Jeremiah Wright would baptize Obama, perform his marriage to Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, baptize their daughters, and draw him into the raucous, restless family of faith that Obama had never known before.
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The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change does not come naturally.
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Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.