Guess quote

Nancy Gibbs [1960-0] American

Rank: 101
Journalist, Essayist

Nancy Reid Gibbs is an American essayist and managing editor for Time magazine, a best-selling author and commentator on politics and values in the United States.

Medical, Space, Anger, Car, Courage, Death, Design, Failure, Faith, Family, History, Imagination, Intelligence, Knowledge, Leadership, Learning, Marriage, Power, Relationship, Teacher, Technology, Time, Trust, War, Women

Quote	Tags	Rank
Runners exalt the marathon as a public test of private will, when months or years of solitary training, early mornings, lost weekends, rain and pain mature into triumph or surrender. That's one reason the race-day crowds matter, the friends who come to cheer and stomp and flap their signs and push the runners on.		101
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.	History, Relationship	102
A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon.	Power	103
I live in a dumb house. Which is not to say that I don't love its quirky charm, its drafty windows and leaky fireplaces and an electrical system that protests when too many people are trying to vacuum and microwave at the same time. But charm is not always user-friendly.	Time	104
I come from a family of teachers, and I believe ideas matter; the good ones deserve reverence, and the bad ones, defiance.	Family	105
The leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19 worldwide is not accident or violence or disease; it is complications from pregnancy. Girls under 15 are up to five times as likely to die while having children than are women in their 20s, and their babies are more likely to die as well.	Death, Women	106
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.	Space	107
It's always been a luxury to be able to hop a plane to Paris, to Venice, to the Grand Canyon.		108
On a normal day, we value heroism because it is uncommon. On Sept. 11, we valued heroism because it was everywhere.		109
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.	Courage	110
Summer is not obligatory. We can start an infernally hard jigsaw puzzle in June with the knowledge that, if there are enough rainy days, we may just finish it by Labor Day, but if not, there's no harm, no penalty. We may have better things to do.	Knowledge	111
We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.		112
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.		113
High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others.		114
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.	Medical	115
The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.	War	116
Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.		117
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.		118
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.		119
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.	Faith, Marriage	120
All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together.		121
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.		122
A runner's stride is not perfectly efficient.		123
I have two daughters: One an open book, one a locked box. So the question of privacy is a challenging one. How much do kids need? How much should we give? How do we prepare them to live in a world where the very notion of privacy opens a generational chasm?		124
Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.		125
Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.	Learning	126
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.		201
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.		202
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.	Space	203
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.		204
In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.		205
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.		206
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.		207
Our children will outwit us if they want; for when it comes to technology, they hold the higher ground. Unlike other tools passed carefully and ceremonially from one generation to the next - the sharp scissors, the car keys - this is one they understand better than we do.	Car, Technology	208
Sometimes justice is at its most merciful when it's blind.		209
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.	Trust	210
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.		211
All wars, even the noblest, bring a reckoning of means and ends.		212
Adolescence, that swampy zone between safety and power, is best patrolled by adults armed with sense and mercy, not guns and a badge.		213
When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.		214
In design as in life, smart can also mean wise, kind, inspiring - and cost-effective. And that has a charm all its own.	Design	215
Death will never be pretty - its sights and smells too close and crude. And it will never come under our control: it gallops where we tiptoe, rips up our routines, burns our very breath with its heat and sting.		216
When I was coming out of college, storytelling was very much something you did with pencil and paper, so the technological platform versatility, I think, is really valuable.		217
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.		218
When National Guardsmen shot four unarmed students at Kent State, virtually the entire system of higher education shuddered and stopped.		219
Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger.	Anger	220
Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.	Imagination	221
We are bombarded with reasons to stay inside: we're afraid of mosquitoes because of West Nile and grass because of pesticides and sun because of cancer and sunscreen because of vitamin-D deficiency.		222
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.		223
The days of the Pentagon Papers debates seem long past, when a sudden transparency yielded insight into fights over war and peace and freedom and security; the transparency afforded by Twitter and Facebook yields insights that extend no further than a lawmaker's boundless narcissism and a culture's pitiless prurience.		224
Modesty means admitting the possibility of error, subsuming the self for the good of the whole, remaining open to surprise and the gifts that only failure can bring. There are many ways to practice it. Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager.	Failure	225
Hillary Clinton wants to leave behind No Child Left Behind.		226
What is it about summer that makes children grow? We feed and water them more. They do get more sun, but that probably doesn't matter as much as the book they read or the rule they broke that taught them something they couldn't have learned any other way.		301
You can't predict when a crisis might hit your family, whether it's with an elderly parent or with your children.		302
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.		303
I've always found that once you're in the door of a place and you have the chance to show how you operate and how talented you are, then anything can happen.		304
Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly - young and old, faithful and cynical - as has Pope Francis.		305
Progress is seldom simple; it comes with costs and casualties, even challenges about whether a change represents an advance or a retreat.		306
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.		307
The typical white American woman in 1800 gave birth seven times; by 1900, the average was down to 3.5.		308
Enter politics, and you enter the glass house; there are no secrets and no places to hide.		309
What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.		310
Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.		311
The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance?		312
Whatever people thought the first time they held a portable phone the size of a shoe in their hands, it was nothing like where we are now, accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips.		313
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.		314
In the case of the classic Western helicopter parent, it starts with Baby Einstein and reward charts for toilet training, and it never really ends, which is why colleges have to devote so many resources to teaching parents how to leave their kids alone.		315
Democracy presumes that we're all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.		316
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.		317
Time dissolves in summer anyway: days are long, weekends longer. Hours get all thin and watery when you are lost in the book you'd never otherwise have time to read. Senses are sharper - something about the moist air and bright light and fruit in season - and so memories stir and startle.		318
Years later, nothing makes me more grateful as a parent than my daughters' encounters with classroom wizards.		319
Rand Paul does not like being compared to his father Ron any more than sons named Bush like to dance in their father's shadow, but the crucial difference is that while the Bushes all hail from the relative mainstream of the GOP, the Pauls have an ideological tributary virtually to themselves.		320
People don't blame the act of driving for auto accidents.		321
In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.		322
Decision making in a democracy depends above all on knowledge and not just the intel available to presidents and policymakers.		323
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.		324
While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.		325
Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war - and the troubles that flow from it.		326
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.		401
Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting.		402
As a candidate, Obama disdained the game of politics, a self-conscious contrast to all the tireless political athletes named Clinton.		403
After the 1960s and '70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country's highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.		404
If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe.		405
Terror works like a musical composition, so many instruments, all in tune, playing perfectly together to create their desired effect. Sorrow and horror and fear.		406
The crossroads of science and politics is a dodgy place.		407
We will never know if any other president approached Nixon in paranoia, profanity or potential criminality, since only his conversations were captured, subpoenaed and ultimately released on the front pages of newspapers.		408
Presidents make their hard decisions and then abide forever with their mistakes and regrets.		409
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.		410
The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.		411
I would like to see every newspaper and every magazine have a network of bureaus all over the world, gathering news.		412
Power is not just political. It can be cultural; it can be spiritual.		413
I like the fact that glass ceilings are breaking all over.		414
If anything, the power of the cover of 'Time' has increased as the media landscape has atomized.		415
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.		416
Barack Obama wants teacher service scholarships.	Teacher	417
'Sesame Street's' genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things - death, divorce, danger - in terms that children understand and accept.		418
Professor Obama has at least talked to us like we're adults.		419
There's a smartphone gait: the slow sidewalk weave that comes from being lost in conversation rather than looking where you're going.		420
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?	Medical	421
As you probably know, I've written a lot about the presidency, so it's obviously exciting when you get to interview a president and write about it.		422
I've been grateful that 'Time's' reach and mandate is so broad; anything you're interested in, you can usually write about.		423
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.		424
You can't hold up a blog; you can hold up a magazine.		425
There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.	Leadership	426
There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.		501
I'm wondering how many elected figures any of us could find who do not, in the front or back of their minds, remember who does them favors, who doesn't.		502
Sure, we want to know what a president believes in... but that doesn't always mean he should tell us.		503
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.		504
Time is valuable; people are busy.		505
It's no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets.		506
When you are a media celebrity, every word you speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak.		507
It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.		508
At times, it seems as if the only women effortlessly balancing their jobs, kids, husbands and homes are the ones on TV.		509
In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 1 in 5 girls make it to secondary school.		510
As long as people have been making little people, they've wanted to know how not to.		511
Members of royal families are born into a world of indulgence and entitlement, and the princelings who grow up that way may never have to develop any discipline.		512
Bill Clinton left office with a more than 60% approval rating.		513
If boomers were always looking to shock, millennials are eager to share.		514
There may be no less original idea than the notion that our hearts hold dominion over our heads.		515
It is actually the neuroscientists and evolutionists who do the best job of explaining the reasons behind the most unreasonable behavior.		516
Americans are grateful for the connection and convenience their phones provide, helping them search for a lower price, navigate a strange city, expand a customer base or track their health and finances, their family and friends.		517
Some people are born strong or stretchy, or with a tungsten will.		518
Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal?		519
We want laws to be applied predictably.		520
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.		521
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.		522
Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.		523
The real luxury travel of the modern age is not through space; it's through time.		524
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.		525
Calling Rand Paul 'the most interesting man in politics' is an invitation to an argument - but one we suspect he'd love to have.		526
My husband and I don't have sons, so we never had to ask ourselves how we'd have felt about them playing football.		601
Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.		602
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.		603
It is faith that drives us to build, a belief that we cannot be limited by lack of nerve or airspace.		604
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.		605
Few Westerners know Iran as well as Robin Wright: her first trip there as a journalist was in 1973, and she has covered every important milestone since, from the Islamic revolution and the hostage crisis to the more recent staring contest with the West over Tehran's nuclear program.		606
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.		607
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.		608
After 9/11, whatever the evidence of intelligence failures, many people still saw that attack as almost unimaginable, so brutal and brazen an assault.	Intelligence	609
America's presidents tend to die young. Maybe it is in the nature of the men who reach such heights, or of the job once they attain it.		610
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.'		611
George W. Bush, though a president's son, is cast as Reagan's heir even more than his father's.		612
In 2001, President George W. Bush was condemned for politicizing science with his decision to limit federal funding for stem-cell research; in 2009 President Obama was praised for reversing it, even though his decision was arguably just as political.		613
Charlie Rangel was writing laws on our taxes as chair of the Ways and Means Committee while somehow neglecting to pay his own.		614
A president can't go to every memorial service.		615
Rooting from the sidelines is the most democratic of sporting rites: no skyboxes, no tickets required, just an unabashed will to holler and wave.		616
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.		617

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