Tina Brown Quotations

In all the debate about Afghanistan, we don't hear much about our obligation to the wretched lives of Afghan women. They are being treated as collateral damage as the big boys discuss geopolitical goals.

We live in a culture of destructive transparency.

Perhaps Obama is often slow to nail controversies because he needs time to live inside them for a while in his head. It's unnerving for the rest of us, but even the haters, one feels, are made to think more deeply than they'd like before they return to the bickering and the games.

The 2008 financial crisis is usually attributed to vampire squid greed. There was certainly a lot of that. But it was also just as likely to have been caused by the chaos of process created by those big, sexy bank mergers when, in the name of 'economies of scale,' critical members of the trust and responsibility chain were cavalierly eliminated.

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.

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.

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

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?

I'm trying to be entertaining without being mean

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

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.

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

The Taliban knows they have more to fear from an educated girl than an American drone.

TV journalism is a much more collaborative, horizontal business than print reporting. It has to be, because of the logistics. Anchors are wholly dependent on producers to do all the hustling

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.

When Obama heralds another 'teachable moment,' it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.

No one has put in harder training to become a royal bride than the glossy-haired Kate Middleton.

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

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

To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What's new is the way it's hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.

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.

Captain Richard Phillips of the good ship Maersk Alabama - and Sully Sullenberger splashing down his crippled airliner in the Hudson River - broke through the poisonous smog of economic depression and Wall Street skullduggery with a reminder that pure individual heroism is a daily occurrence if we know where to look for it.

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.

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 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.

The rights of women are to the 21st century what civil rights were to the 20th.

When George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, the precious possession he brought with him from home was his personal feather pillow. The theme of the Bush years was obliviousness. He was famously unavailable for debate and dialogue. He was deaf to countervailing voices. He hit the sack early and always got a good night's sleep.

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.

Obama's stern demeanor punctuated by intermittent flashes of his wide, relaxing smile is his greatest weapon in defusing pent-up angst.

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.

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

One common denominator of super-affluent alpha men is the conviction, unchallenged every day, that the world revolves around them.

Celebrity these days is completely for sale; it's not remotely mysterious. But there's something that remains glamorous and mysterious about royalty.

Until 1869, when they were banned, debtors' prisons were the great incinerators of British reputations. Those who were unable to pay their bills were jailed until their creditors were paid - an unlikely event, given that the prisoner was unable to work.

The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all. Everyone is under too much scrutiny now to take a chance on candidates who suddenly blow up into a comic meme, a punchline, a ribald hashtag.

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.

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

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

'Out of the box' corporate thinking helped carry real American innovation out in a box. A pine box.

There is nobody more boring than the undefeated.

'Worshipping in private,' as Obama does, comes off as just another form of annoying elitism.

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

I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print

I think that big, sort of theatrical relaunches tend to set you up for failure and hype.

Reputation is a timely subject, now that nobody has one.

Servility always curdles into rage in the end.

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

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

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

'Wingnuts' is the first book bearing the imprint of Beast Books.

Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre.

Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that's no excuse.

Almost every media organization is doing something with live events now, and that's because they feel they can break through that way.

The British Isles are awash with the choice of beautiful historic churches, abbeys, and cathedrals where one king or another has tied the knot and bestowed a royal precedent.

What is new is the multiplying reach and volume of the Internet, concentrating the toxicity of destructive emotions and circulating them in the political bloodstream with unparalleled velocity.

Back in his Chicago Senate days, when he was seeking greater black credibility, Obama was happy enough to attend the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ.

For Sarah Palin, the least experienced on the world stage, the stress of maintaining the fiction that she was qualified to be vice president sent her over the deep end almost immediately. She went off on a ferocious spending spree that might have killed a lesser woman. Katie Couric's straightforward questions unraveled her.

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.

It's one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs.

Obama has figured out the best method to prepare the way for his verbal Houdini acts: Use political noise as the tune-up din before the aria. Perhaps his body temperature is so low, it sometimes takes him too long to break out the song.

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.

What America is thirsting for now is a battalion of strong, down-to-earth 'doers' - managers, frontline activists, business and social entrepreneurs engaged in tackling America's manifold problems of unemployment, education, and competitive slouch.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.

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.

Nothing is better for a young journalist than to go and write about something that other people don't know about. If you can afford to send yourself to some foreign part, I still think that's by far the best way to break in

Periodically, 'The New York Times' runs a business news story lamenting how few women still make it to the top in the Wall Street boys' club. Could it be that women are choosing to be conscientious objectors in these wars of one against all?

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.

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 women of Afghanistan, left behind as their men fought, did what the women of World War II did - used their wits and resourcefulness to preserve some semblance of civilization.

Owning news makes you important; it gives you a seat at the table.

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

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

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

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

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

Corporate communications will become a high-tech art, just as political communication is for Obama.

Disinterested public service has become, just so... what's the phrase, 'old school.'

Everyone is someone else's catalyst for selling something these days.

Feminism in some ways has become quite dormant.

Glenn Beck is Rush redux - Limbaugh with liposuction, partying like it's still 1993.

I am thrilled to share the news that Andrew Sullivan is bringing his trailblazing journalism to 'The Daily Beast.'

I keep thinking about how terrifyingly vulnerable women are in so many countries.

I know as much as anyone how much her most fervent supporters want Hillary Clinton to run for president.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting

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

I've always been very enamored of European newsmagazines - the 'Spiegel' kind of magazine, which has an energetic, high-low approach to news.

If a star football player can have a mythical girlfriend, why can't I have a mythical Congress?

In the end, Dan Rather's legend skewered him, CBS and the craft of journalism.

In the world of screens, we're all tired of screens. That's why I think that live events have become so popular.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar turned out to be all hat and no cattle with his sorry oversight of the Minerals Management Service.

It's actually harder than it looks to be a good pundit on the air. You've got to have stuff to say.

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

Whether it's in Washington, or whether it's with the mothers of extremists, or whether it's education in places like Pakistan... a lot of women in these emerging countries are taking charge and doing amazing things.

Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides credit to productive enterprise. Whatever.

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.

We're a part of both communities. It gives a chance to not only share what we're about with the campus but those around us.

Let's face it: innovation in the U.S. is now the province of our thriving city-states. We all know that nothing happens in Washington anymore.

She's handled herself with enormous gallantry, ... She must have been through a lot of private pain, but she's put her best foot forward and she's tried to start a new life.

One phrase I would dearly like to consign to the can is 'Out of the Box.' The thinking that told us we should invade Iraq and that house prices never decline may have been out of the box, but it put us into the ditch. We have been badly misled by people who persuaded us that they understood things we didn't.

One of the the great things about having had something that didn't work out is: So what? I am fine.