Nancy Gibbs Quotes

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.

I come from a family of teachers, and I believe ideas matter; the good ones deserve reverence, and the bad ones, defiance.

Progress is seldom simple; it comes with costs and casualties, even challenges about whether a change represents an advance or a retreat.

There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.

Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.

A runner's stride is not perfectly efficient.

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.

A lot of camps and summer programs for kids seem to have discovered that among the most valuable things they offer is what they don't offer. No Wi-Fi. No grades. No hovering parents or risk managers or parents who parent like risk managers.

Sure, we want to know what a president believes in... but that doesn't always mean he should tell us.

As a candidate, Obama disdained the game of politics, a self-conscious contrast to all the tireless political athletes named Clinton.

It's hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones.

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.

My husband and I don't have sons, so we never had to ask ourselves how we'd have felt about them playing football.

A president can't go to every memorial service.

Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.

The typical white American woman in 1800 gave birth seven times; by 1900, the average was down to 3.5.

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.

Some people are born strong or stretchy, or with a tungsten will.

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.

I would like to see every newspaper and every magazine have a network of bureaus all over the world, gathering news.

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.

Power is not just political. It can be cultural; it can be spiritual.

Democracy presumes that we're all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.

Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.

You can't hold up a blog; you can hold up a magazine.

Sometimes justice is at its most merciful when it's blind.

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.

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.

The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.

I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.

Teaching sometimes seems like not one profession, but every profession. We ask them to be doctor and diplomat, calf-herder, map-maker, wizard and watchman, electricians of the mind.

On the court, Jason Collins is not a huge basketball star, but he has already claimed his place in civil rights history as the first openly gay athlete to play in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues.

Charlie Rangel was writing laws on our taxes as chair of the Ways and Means Committee while somehow neglecting to pay his own.

On a normal day, we value heroism because it is uncommon. On Sept. 11, we valued heroism because it was everywhere.

We've seen what happens when it serves a president's interest to flaunt his faith - which is almost inevitably does, since every poll affirms that Americans want their leader to submit to some higher power.

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.

Years later, nothing makes me more grateful as a parent than my daughters' encounters with classroom wizards.

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 1 in 5 girls make it to secondary school.

Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.

Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.

A good president needs a big comfort zone. He should be able to treat enemies as opportunities, appear authentic in joy and grief, stay cool under the hot lights.

What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.

All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.

All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together.

Enter politics, and you enter the glass house; there are no secrets and no places to hide.

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.

Even if it wasn't always morning in America during the years of his presidency, Reagan's eagerness to insist that it was tapped into a longing among voters. They didn't want to picture themselves turning down their thermostats and buttoning up their cardigans. They wanted to strut again. Reagan opened his arms and said, 'Walk this way.'

New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola.

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.