Meg Greenfield Quotations

We are fickle and we are insatiable in our appetite for new news, new biases, new cliches.... It's not just... that individuals all seem to get their fifteen minutes of celebrity; everything gets only fifteen minutes.

Thin skin is the only kind of skin human beings come with.

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

There's nothing so dangerous for manipulators as people who choose to think for themselves.

The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.

In Washington it is an honor to be disgraced. you have to have been somebody to fall.

Since when do grown men and women, who presume to hold high government office and exercise what they think of as "moral leadership," require ethics officers to tell them whether it is or isn't permissible to grab the secretary's behind or redirect public funds to their own personal advantage?

Washington, under Democrats and Republicans, has a profoundly neurotic attitude toward 'the people.' It is built on equal parts of suspicion, loathing, fear, respect and dependence.

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

Everyone seems to be running against a liar, but nobody seems to be one. Odd - I mean, the math doesn't work out.

Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.

If you were starting from scratch to invent an instrument that could impose fiscal discipline, the last one on earth you would come up with is the United States government.

There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.

In government and out, there are vast realms of the bureaucracy dedicated to seeking more information, in perpetuity if need be, in order to avoid taking action.