Top 75 Tina Brown Quotes

An enormous number of mothers in the U.S. are working double time, graveyard shifts, and more than one job just to put food on the table for their kids.

American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long, a whole generation gave up on them.

Where did the inspiring Obama of the campaign go, that Facebook pied piper who friended the whole world with this update: ‘Change you can believe in.’ What happened to him?

Movie stars today are as greedy for additional kids as bankers are for bonuses. It’s the new badge of authenticity.

Voters seem to understand what a big waste of time trying to change Washington is.

Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton.

Admitting weakness seems to be such a severe psychic threat for Bush that when he makes a mistake it’s safer just to reinforce it. The strategy creates a perverse system of rewards and punishments.

I wish my daughter wasn’t spending time thinking of Kim Kardashian or Rihanna.

CBS’s Ed Murrow may have been over-celebrated as the principled observer for the masses, fair yet unafraid to take on the bullies.

It is ironic that American women now need to be fortified by the inspiration of the women of the Arab Spring, who risked so much to win basic human rights.

Everywhere you look, there’s a hunger to put the ethos by which Wall Street thrives on trial.

‘The Daily Beast’ and Howard Kurtz have parted company.

The natural creativity of the staff morphed ‘The Daily Beast’ very fast into what has become a newsroom. Aggregation lives on the Cheat Sheet, the video player, and in the breaking news slot in the first big box. The rest is all original, generated by Beast writers and editors.

The cloud that descended on Black Rock on Monday was not for the past but the future. How much will this debacle chill the pursuit of other risky investigations?

The digital explosion has been so explosive.

I haven’t spent years, like Alyse Nelson of Vital Voices, toiling for female economic empowerment on five continents.

The post-presidency, as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have proved, is a win-win. Money, Nobels, the ability to leverage your global celebrity for any cause or hobbyhorse you wish, plus freedom to grab the mike whenever the urge takes you without any terminal repercussions.

Prince William’s smiling hostility toward the press is his non-negotiable core value. I am told he is so protective of his privacy he has been known to plant false tips with friends he distrusts and watch the media to see if they play out.

Obama achieved something in his first year with health care that successive presidents have been unable to achieve.

Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks.

The digitally native generation has no idea what has been lost to the freedom of intimacy that has no fear of being recorded.

The Duke of York has never remarried.

Top doctors, I have come to believe, are as big a menace to your health as top money managers are to your bank account. They are almost never available to talk to.

Public life has become so gladiatorial. Every day, another reputation bites the dust.

What has happened to America’s survival instincts?

Unlike the Kennedy dynasty, who always knew how to pay off people who might make trouble, the Windsors can’t bring themselves to part with any royal trinkets.

Along with all those books about Lincoln, Obama might read some biographies of Napoleon. The general who established the Legion d’Honneur understood that people fought as much for medals as for morals.

I don’t actually go to newsstands anymore.

In today’s gig economy, where jobs have been replaced by ‘portfolios of projects,’ most people find themselves doing more things less well for two-thirds of the money.

Give Obama a script he has made his own, and he is the motivational speaker to end all speakers. Tony Robbins cloned with Honest Abe.

The number one way of becoming powerful in Washington is by becoming the ‘Washington Post.’

When I took over ‘The New Yorker,’ there was a very, very good, smart staff in place.

It’s almost as if Putin is brilliant, really – he’s outfoxing Obama all the time.

The comptroller of New York City ought to have all the characteristics of a major corporation’s CFO – quiet rigor, obsessive care for detail, incorruptible judgment, an ability to work assiduously behind the scenes with the key stakeholders.

It was Barry Diller’s idea to start ‘The Daily Beast,’ and he has turned out to be the best partner I’ve ever had. There’s no one better to go into the jungle with.

Obama can’t change his cool disposition, though it would be nice if he lost the vaguely grudging air he gives off that problems of management get in the way of ideas.

Schwarzenegger is big, he’s noisy, he’s larger than life, and he’s earned the credibility to be cast for the role of America’s Green superhero.

Any great, long career has at least one flameout in it.

The viral power of online media has proven how fast creative ideas can be spread and adopted, using tools like cellphones, digital cameras, micro-credit, mobile banking, Facebook, and Twitter. A perfect example? The way the Green Movement in Iran caught fire thanks to social media.

Obama, for all his brilliance, has no real, felt understanding of management structures or of business.

To win respect, the networks seem to feel they have to keep absurdly overstating their anchors’ reporting cred.

The first black president was a hotter plot line than the first woman president.

Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone’s definition of an all-American girl – attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul?

The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet’s permission, so is courage.

It’s Obama’s bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed.

With so many part-time people on – and not on – the job, corporate America has started to feel like it’s on a permanent maternity leave. Colleagues are an amorphous, free-floating army of rotating waifs whose voicemails are clogged with plaintive requests from their own offices for missing information.

Hillary Clinton has spent her entire career looking bug-eyed with incredulity when an interviewer asks her whatever question she most expects at that moment.

No one is asking for an Oprah in Chief. Anyhow, Obama is too chilly by nature ever to be convincing as a human care package.

I just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I’ve been or something I’ve done. Or politics. It’s going to what’s on my mind at the moment.

Now everyone leaking and tweeting and posting on everyone else is the acknowledged way to get ahead in the 21st century.

By the end of ‘Game Change,’ one feels that the candidates’ few happy moments are those when they ‘lose it.’

It’s as if inside the White House the belief in Obama’s inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it’s a startling revelation.

In TV, you always feel you are standing on the tracks of an oncoming train.

For a guy who believes in hope, Obama doesn’t seem to be able to spread much of it around. How can he? We know too much now about the hollowness of institutions and the frailty of their leaders.

Plenty of couples snipe at each other in sometimes embarrassing ways in front of company.

Even as the whole world tries to hang on to its job, there is also this weird parallel sense – almost a covert longing – that the old corrupt structures on which that job depends needs to be, ought to be, swept away.

I’m impressed with how ‘Newsweek’s’ outstanding staff has continued to put out a lively, well-informed magazine after the departure of their tireless editor, Jon Meacham.

I think British journalists do well in America because the newspaper culture there is so strong – telling stories and presenting them readably is in their DNA. British newspapers get a terrible rap, but they are brilliant in their presentation, most of them, so full of vitality and literary wit.

It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama’s meager resume – ‘a mere community organizer!’ – before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama’s experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.

Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies.

It’s interesting how the view from abroad can shift and remake perceptions of homegrown celebrities, the ones who are part of the gross domestic product.

Oprah’s stock in trade has always been her powerful unmediated connection. She could feel your pain and empower you to talk about it.

Disinterested public service has become, just so… what’s the phrase, ‘old school.’

The question for Obama is how he can rein in the furies of populism while making us all feel the malefactors of great wealth are being sufficiently punished.