I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful.

If one is rich and one's a woman, one can be quite misunderstood.

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

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.

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.

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

For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown. ... It is a city that offers me more people -- more different kinds of people -- than I could otherwise possibly have come to know in a lifetime: the native Washingtonian, the local merchant, the foreign diplomat, the ever-present tourist, the public servant, the journalist, the president, the friend.