To love what you do and feel that it matters how could anything be more fun?
A mistake is simply another way of doing things.
No one can avoid aging, but aging productively is something else.
My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did.
The thing women must do to rise to power is to redefine their femininity. Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex.
I truly believed that other people in my position didn't make mistakes; I couldn't see that everybody makes them, even people with great experience.
The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome.
Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique.
To me, involvement with news is absolutely inebriating. It's what makes my life exciting.
I love Martha's Vineyard, where I have had a house for thirty years. I have loved visiting countries around the world. But I always come home to Washington.
Those first few years of marriage, before the war interrupted all our lives, Phil and I had a very happy time. I grew up considerably, mostly thanks to him.
The image of me as someone who likes or can deal with a fight is wrong. Some people enjoy competition and dustups, and I wish I did, but I don't. But once you have started down a path, then I think you have to move forward. You can't give up.
I always liked Barbara Howar and admired her spunk. I know that she considered me - and Alice Roosevelt Longworth - an exception to her negative feelings about Washington widows and single women, whom she basically found dispensable.
Potomac School proved to be my first big adjustment - one that helped me with a basic lesson of growing up: learning to get along in whatever world one is deposited.
I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.
Mother set impossibly high standards for us, creating tremendous pressures and undermining our ability to accomplish whatever modest aims we may have set for ourselves.
There seems to me nothing very bad about a nation's capital having good intentions - and when the intentions are magnificent, so much the better.
Dean Acheson was one of the very best and brightest of the men who ever came to Washington.
At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man's world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries. But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere.
Although at the time I didn't realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase, 'If it's all right with you.' If I thought I'd done anything to make someone unhappy, I'd agonize.
